Research Snapshot
New study finds that teens are getting less sleep than ever
A new study by Rachel Widome found that while teenagers at every age reported less sleep in recent decades, Black and Latino teens are now less likely than white peers to get adequate sleep, and disparities have increased since the mid-2000s.
Aging and Health Launchpad
Understanding the Paid Care Workforce
Measuring Care of Older Adults with IPUMS Data
Paid care work forms the backbone of the U.S. health and social care systems, encompassing a wide range of occupations responsible for delivering clinical care, personal assistance, and preventive services. Despite its central role in population health and economic functioning, paid care work remains challenging to measure systematically. Care jobs are often distributed across diverse settings, span multiple occupational classifications, and involve complex combinations of clinical, relational, and administrative tasks that are not always well captured in traditional labor statistics. As a result, researchers require data infrastructure that links detailed employment information with demographic and contextual characteristics to fully understand the paid care workforce.
IPUMS provides harmonized data from major national surveys that make it possible to study paid care work consistently across time and across data sources. Drawing on datasets such as the American Community Survey and the Current Population Survey, IPUMS enables researchers to identify paid care workers using detailed occupation and industry codes and to analyze their wages, hours, job stability, and demographic characteristics. By supporting longitudinal and cross-sectional analyses, IPUMS allows researchers to examine employment trends, workforce composition, and inequality within the paid care sector.
Network for Data-Intensive Research on Aging
The Network for Data-Intensive Research on Aging (NDIRA) supports an emerging interdisciplinary community of scientists using novel collections of cross-sectional, longitudinal, and contextual data for research on population aging. NDIRA membership is open to all researchers.
Data-Intensive Research Conference
Novel Data Linkages and Innovative Life Course Research
July 22-23, 2026
Conference registration open through July 3, 2026
Preliminary program now available
Pre-Conference Workshop
July 20-21, 2026
UPCOMING EVENTS
MEMBER HIGHLIGHT
Stephanie M. Carlson
Stephanie Carlson is a Distinguished McKnight University Professor and incoming Director at the Institute of Child Development, University of Minnesota. Dr. Carlson is an internationally recognized leader in the study of executive function, which she refers to as the brain basis of self-control. With funding from the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation, she has developed innovative ways of measuring executive function and made discoveries about the role of executive function in other important aspects of human development, including decision making, perspective taking, academic achievement, and mental health. Her current research focuses on ways to improve executive function through reflective practices.
Supported By
Grant number P30AG066613