1996 PAA Award Winners


The first winner of the biennial Clifford C. Clogg Award, given in recognition of "important and innovative contributions to the design, collection, modeling, or analysis of population survey or census data," is Michael Hout of the University of California, Berkeley. His many accomplishments include the classic text, Mobility Tables; his SAT (status, autonomy, and training) model of the mobility table--a key methodological and substantive advance in our understanding of intergenerational social mobility, which he has successfully applied both to explanations of trend and of black-white differences in mobility; and his forthcoming book with several Berkeley colleagues which demolishes key empirical claims of Herrnstein and Murray's Bell Curve. Amidst these contributions, Mike has created a vigorous program of empirical training and research at Berkeley, he has strengthened ties between the sociology and demography groups, and he now leads the Berkeley Center for Survey Research.

Shripad Tuljapurkar of Stanford University was given the Mindel Sheps Award for Mathematical Demography. His work on the evolution of populations in uncertain environments and on population forecasting proves just how important it is to attend fully to random variation. In addition to his important work on human populations, this scholar has made many significant contributions to the study of non-human populations, the interactions among populations, and the dynamics of infectious disease. He is now among the leaders in the new field of biodemography.

Clea Sucoff received the Dorothy S. Thomas Award, for the best dissertation: "Neighborhood Context and the Risk of Adolescent Childbearing among Urban African American Women." Dr. Sucoff, who is a postdoctoral fellow at RAND, received her Ph.D. in September 1995 from the School of Public Health at the University of California Los Angeles. Her thesis advisor was Dawn Upchurch.

The PAA Board awarded blue ribbons to selected posters at the annual meeting. Three judges reviewed each poster session, using as their criteria the desire to award effectiveness in various forms of presentation, understanding that some individuals have access to more resources for presentations, but that the ability to lay out a presentation in an attractive and comprehensible style, to use an appropriate mix of text and figures, and to draw the reader into the message is not dependent on the technical quality of the graphics used. The winners are: