Deen Lillard, Associate Professor, Ohio State University, USA: ‘I Expect Opportunities for Cross-Country Collaboration to Grow’

The First International ‘Russia Longitudinal Monitoring Survey of HSE’ User Conference will be held in Moscow on May, 17-18th. Deen Lillard, Associate Professor, Department of Human Sciences and Director and Project Manager of the Cross-National Equivalent File Study, Ohio State University, USA, one of the keynote speakers at the conference gave a special interview to the HSE news service.

— Why are you interested in research on Russia?

— I am an economist who is interested in understanding  how and why people allocate scarce resources as they do. These resources include many things but the fundamental resources people have consist of time, money, energy, effort, and native ability.  The goal of the study of economics is to understand how people can allocate resources to improve their lives. As a source of data to study this process – the process people follow to maximize their overall welfare - Russia provides interesting opportunities. Russian society is rich, complex, and diverse. It has experienced tremendous social, political, and economic changes in the recent past. As a result, it is a fascinating environment to study economic behavior. As importantly, the tremendous variation in all aspects of life in the recent past present opportunities for economists and social scientists to better understand fundamental economic and social behavior. With that knowledge, we will hopefully be able to devise social and public policies that yield greater benefits not only for Russians but for people everywhere.

— What led you to seek a working relationship with HSE? How could you evaluate it? What are the further perspectives?

— I got involved with HSE because I wanted to study life-course smoking behavior in a cross-national context. I was preparing a grant application, to seek funding from the US National Institutes of Health, in which I proposed the idea that people who smoke follow similar patterns no matter their nationality or culture. To explore that hypothesis and to test whether observed behavior is consistent with it, I needed data from several countries. I learned from colleagues that there were data on smoking behavior for Russians that are collected by Russia Longitudinal Monitoring Study. The prospect of adding data on smoking behavior of Russians served several goals of the research project, so I contacted Barry Popkin about including the data in the proposal.

One thing led to another and I got funding to not only include the RLMS data in the project but to also produce a file, using the RLMS data, for the Cross-National Equivalent File. Within a few years, the Higher School of Economics provided a secure funding for the RLMS and continued our collaboration.

My experiences have been quite positive. And I hope to not only continue our collaboration through the CNEF project but to explore other possible areas of collaboration.

— You've been involved in cross-national research in the USA. What are you going to present at the conference in Moscow? What's the main message of your report?

— For the past 15 years I have helped to run a project called the “Cross-National Equivalent File” project (CNEF).  That project draws data from household-based panel studies in eight countries around the world and reworks the data to produce a set of variables that have the same naming structure and measure the same conceptual variables (i.e. are equivalently defined). The project began about 20 years ago from a study that compared the economic resources German and US women experienced after divorce.  CNEF built on the realization that a cross-national study design offers insights that cannot be realized easily in single country research designs. Much of the work in cross-national research involves finding national data sources – usually from country-based surveys – and then making the data more or less equivalent. Since that is a “fixed” cost – an activity that every project must undertake – the researchers involved in the original study (Prof. Richard Burkhauser of Cornell University and Prof. Richard Hauser (emeritus) of the Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main) wanted to make their equivalized data freely available to researchers worldwide. The US National Institutes of Aging agreed, provided funding, and the CNEF was born.

At the conference in Moscow I am going to talk about ideas I have for ways researchers can use the RLMS-HSE to not only provide new knowledge and insights for single country studies but also in the context of cross-national research. I will draw on research I’ve done to provide some examples of ways researchers might use the RLMS-HSE and to point to investments individual researchers can make, and that HSE can help facilitate, that have the potential to contribute to the greater public good of social science research.

— What is exciting for you in your scientific work and why? How do you see a modern scientific world where more and more close collaboration between researchers, universities have been developed?

— As I noted above, I am fundamentally interested in understanding why and how individuals, families, and societies allocate resources. That study ultimately interests me because I believe that the knowledge it produces will help improve the human condition. I am excited to be involved in the production of knowledge that I believe and hope will be used to increase individual freedom, to raise standards of living and to help people find ways to use their time, resources, energy, and abilities to lead satisfying lives. In my opinion, these activities transcend national borders, political affiliations, and ethnic groups. Through the CNEF project I’ve had the good fortune and honor to interact with some of the leading international scholars in social science. While that is a self-selected sample of scholars interested in cross-national collaborations, I have seen the membership of that group grow tremendously over the past 15 years. Further, governments everywhere, including Russia and the US, have recognized the value of the international scholarly collaborations and are funding efforts to support them. Consequently, I expect opportunities for cross-country collaboration to grow and I expect the social science community to increasingly recognize the value of cross-national collaboration and research.

— Is there anything specific you are expecting from the conference in Moscow?

— I expect to listen to presentations of new research findings, to meet interesting new researchers, to get to know HSE better and to establish and begin to build professional relationships with a new and exciting group of researchers.

 

Anna Chernyakhovskaya, specially for HSE news service