Project Listing

Health Surveys

Title: Survey of Living Conditions in the Arctic, SLiCA - Remote Access Analysis System - Progress update (pdf)

Summary of Activity

SLiCA is an interdisciplinary and international research project, which was founded in 1998. The two major objectives are (1) to develop a new research design for measurement of living conditions and individual well-being among the Inuit and Saami peoples in the Arctic and the indigenous peoples of Chukotka reflecting the welfare priorities of the indigenous peoples and (2) to carry out a survey of living conditions among these peoples. The project is developed in partnership with the indigenous peoples organisations. SLiCA has accomplished the first objective and finished data collection in Canada, Alaska, and Chukotka. By the end of 2006 data collection will be completed also in Greenland, Norway, Sweden, Finland and the Kola Peninsula. The data material will consist of approximately 15.000 personal interviews.

In 2005 and 2006 SLiCA is focusing on achieving two main objectives of the project – concluding analyses and publishing the findings of the analyses. An additional main objective of the project is to make the international data set available to the scientific and indigenous communities of the Arctic as well as to political and administrative decision makers at the local, regional, national and international levels. The original project scope called for the development of a micro data set that could be shared with these communities. Our analyses to date have revealed a major challenge associated with this approach. The protection of the confidentiality of respondents requires collapsing of response categories for such variables as location (e.g. place), occupation, and income. While we anticipated the need for collapsing response categories, we did not anticipate the degree to which this would pose a constraint for multivariate analyses. We further realize that the challenge of providing analytically robust social science data sets and protecting the confidentiality of respondents is common in the Arctic social sciences. We therefore propose to contribute to the IPY goal of expanding our understanding of human dimensions of change in the Arctic by collaborating with an international team to apply and extend the concepts of remote access analysis to the SLiCA international database.

The objective of Remote Access Analysis is to provide researchers with access to a micro data set for analysis (i.e. the individual records of respondents to the SLiCA questionnaire) from their own computers. This capability is particularly valuable in the Arctic given the dispersed character of the scientific and indigenous communities and local political and administrative authorities. We further propose to extend this capability to work with restricted datasets where the sensitivity of data is sufficiently high to warrant restriction of access to the raw data. Researchers and indigenous organizations as well as political and administrative authorities at different levels will be able to conduct analyses while making it impossible to view the micro data set itself.

To accomplish these objectives, the SLiCA international team is collaborating with the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) at the University of Michigan and the Computer-assisted Survey Methods Program (CSM) at the University of California, Berkeley.

Consistent with the IPY goal of fostering a major step forward in our understanding of the human dimensions of change in the Arctic, we propose to have the SLiCA Remote Access Analysis System in place for the 2008 International Congress of Arctic Social Sciences, ICASS VI (endorsed by the ICSU/WMO Joint Committee for the International Polar Year 2007-2008 as an IPY activity), of the International Arctic Social Sciences Association, IASSA. We will provide a demonstration of the System and a training seminar in the use of the system at the conference.

Contacts:

Lead Contact
Mr Birger Poppel
Ilisimatusarfik, University of Greenland
Box 279 Nuuk
3900
Greenland
Tel:          +299 324522/157
Mobile: +299 556266
Fax:         +299 324711
Email:       bipo@ilisimatusarfik.gl

Second Contact
Prof Jack Kruse
Institute of Social and Economic Research, Aniversity of Alaska Anchorage
117 N. Leverett Rd. Leverett
MA 01054
USA
Tel:          +(413) 367 2240
Mobile: N/A
Fax:         same number
Email:      afjak@uaa.alaska.edu