Autumn School “Population and Health 2023”

From October 16 to 20, the International Laboratory for Population and Health of HSE University, Human Capital Multidisciplinary Research Center and the Strategic Project «National Centre of Science, Technology and Socio-Economic Foresight» held the Autumn School “Population and Health 2023”. More than 20 students, graduate students and young scientists took part in the school. Participants became familiar with approaches to measuring health, mortality data, measures of inequality and current studies, and gained practical experience in calculating various indicators in statistical software R.

On the first day, participants listened to an introductory lecture by Sergey Timonin (Australian National University) on various approaches to measuring health at the population level and a lecture by Alexey Shchur (IL for Population and Health, HSE University) on aggregate mortality measures and healthy life expectancy. Students tried to make calculations of the studied indicators using the statistical package R as part of a practical session led by Alexey Shchur and Egor Sergeev (IL for Population and Health, HSE University).

On the second day of the school, Dmitri Jdanov, chief research fellow at the IL for Population and Health, introduced the sources of data on mortality and health, and spoke about measures of inequality. The day ended with a practical session on calculating measures of health inequality in the R statistical package.

The third day of the school was opened by Vladimir Shkolnikov, the academic supervisor of the IL for Population and Health. He gave a lecture on research of life expectancy and health of the Russian population. Then the head of the IL for Population and Health Evgeny Andreev spoke about the effect of alcohol on mortality and health of the population of Russia. Elena Selezneva (Institute for Social Policy, HSE University) introduced listeners to research studies of health and aging of the population using the example of SHARE and spoke about scales for measuring various aspects of health.

The entire fourth day was devoted to reproductive health of the population. Viktoria Sakevich (Institute of Demography, HSE University) gave a lecture on such aspects of reproductive health as family planning, abortion, infertility, HIV, and maternal mortality. Elena Churilova (IL for Population and Health, HSE University) spoke about fertility and conducted a practical session, emphasizing methodological principles of conducting surveys, peculiarities of formulating questions on reproductive health, and familiarized the audience with modern Russian reproductive health surveys.

On the last day of school, students listened to a lecture by Dmitri Jdanov on methods for estimating excess mortality. In addition, school participants had the opportunity to be the first to get acquainted with the newly created database by employees of the IL for Population and Health, HSE University, and demographers from other scientific institutes: Russian Short-Term Mortality Fluctuations Data Series (RusSTMF).

During all five days of the school, after lectures and practical classes, students worked on group projects: dividing into teams of 2 to 3 people, they calculated various mortality and fertility indicators for selected European countries, Russian regions, and Russia as a whole. Presentations on the results of the projects were presented on the last day of the autumn school. At the end, all students who successfully completed all 5 days of training received certificates.

The school was organized within the framework of a grant provided by the Ministry of Science and Higher Education of the Russian Federation (Grant Agreement No.: 075-15-2022-325).