Fall/Winter 2003-04
Photo by Bridget Brown
Robert McCaa
Professor, history
Education
Ph.D., history, U of California, Los Angeles
B.A., Linfield College, McMinnville, Oregon
Family ties
Spouse, Wanda, two adult sons, and two grandsons
Won't soon forget...
"Being chased in a car by anti-drug police in Mexico. We thought they were just teenagers having fun with the tourists. Fortunately, I was wearing a suit and tie, but had removed my shoes and socks. When I got out of the vehicle, they took one look at my odd appearance and put their guns down."
Would most like to meet from history...
"Huayna Capac, the last Inca before the Spanish conquest. I would want to know if he really had any premonitions of what was coming and whether he was infected with smallpox or some other disease when he died."
All-time favorite movie is...
Hal Ashby's Being There, with Peter Sellers
If he were marooned on an island, he'd wish for...
"A laptop and my wife."
The Negotiator
History professor Robert McCaa travels the globe, making the world safe for historical demography
If you think the Middle East might be an unfriendly place for Americans these days, think again. In September, University of Minnesota history professor Robert McCaa traveled to Amman, Jordan, to attend a meeting of ministers from the Arab League. Representatives, mostly statistical chiefs, from more than 20 countries in the region attended.
"Given what is going on next door, one could imagine that the response would be somewhat chilly," McCaa says.
In fact, the mood was warm. McCaa, whose aim was to negotiate research access to census data, received an invitation to the conference from a Palestinian statistician. During the gathering, McCaa spoke personally with the head of the Syria's statistical bureau and bent the ears of higher-ups from almost every attending country. Though no nation handed over census data on the spot, the Minnesota professor deemed the trip a rousing success. "I wouldn't be surprised if within two years we have agreements with at least 10 states," he says.
McCaa has been racking up lots of frequent-flyer miles in the past year in his effort to garner research agreements with foreign governments. Such cooperative pacts are the foundation for the International Public Use Microdata Systems project, an undertaking initiated by U of M professor Steven Ruggles. McCaa and Ruggles won a five-year grant from the National Science Foundation in 1998 to gather demographic microdata from countries around the globe. So far, 45 countries have agreed to participate in the project representing roughly half of the world's population.
Demographic microdata are the individual household details that are gathered during a census. Age, occupation, education, marital status, and number of children are some basic microdata categories that are part of almost every census, but many countries, including the United States, with its dreaded "long form," also assemble data on the number of televisions, cars, and toilets per household. For researchers looking for a connection between, say, divorce rates and TV purchases, such data can be a gold mine.
But the willingness of governments to release such information varies. The U.S. Census Bureau makes most of its data available, but keeps confidential those details that might reveal the identity of participants. (For historical demographers like McCaa, this isn't particularly troublesome.) Other countries, however, tend to be more protective or even secretive about census results. And when it comes to old census data the kind that most interests historians like McCaa the archives of many nations are often spotty at best.
Synchronizing details
Gathering data isn't the only hurdle faced by researchers. The aim of the IPUMS project is to harmonize the information, so that answers to differing questionnaires can be compared.
Fortunately, efforts by the United Nations to encourage standardization of questions have resulted in widespread commonality of practices among census-takers around the world. But even so, comparative discrepancies exist: Kenya's question regarding marital status, for example, allows respondents to note a polygamous union not uncommon in the African nation. Of course, there's no corresponding designation on the American forms.
Such irregularities are easily dealt with by IPUMS, McCaa says. The program's organizational structure "Ruggles's genius solution" he calls it allows for both standardization of categories and an infinite amount of detail within each category. In other words, a researcher using a computer to slice and dice IPUMS data could call up Kenyan marriage statistics with or without regard to polygamous practices, depending on their goals.
The applications for social researchers and historians are numerous: "If you're studying orphanhood in Kenya and you want to know if orphans are taken in in polygamous unions, or only monogamous unions, you can figure it out," McCaa says.
IPUMS makes such data available over the Internet. Thus, Swedish researchers have instant access not only to census microdata provided by their own government, but to comparative data from a host of other nations as well. "The Internet solves the problem of distribution of data," McCaa notes. "You can disseminate these data at astonishingly low costs."
A passion for history
McCaa's passion for pulling together statistical data is matched only by his love of history. The son of a sawmill worker, he grew up in California and attended college in Oregon before deciding to pursue advanced studies in history at the University of California-Los Angeles.
On the way to his Ph.D., McCaa developed a keen interest in Latin America fueled in part by a Peace Corps stint in Colombia and ultimately won permission from the Chilean government to use never-before-analyzed statistical data for his doctoral thesis about Chilean population changes and their impact.
McCaa arrived at the University of Minnesota in 1974. Despite his rigorous travel schedule (he recently returned from Johannesburg and is planning to go to Tokyo on behalf of IPUMS), he has always found time and energy for teaching undergraduates. These days, he is happily teaching an undergrad course in world population history. "Undergraduates ask great questions," he enthuses.
Looking to the future
Perhaps some of those students will someday use IPUMS to solve important questions. "For example, with respect to the fiscal future of Social Security, wouldn't it be nice to be able to analyze the experience of other countries that may have discovered a way out of this perfect storm?" McCaa says.
"Obviously, the answers are not specifically laid out in these data. But by using these data, we can discover how responsive people are to certain kinds of incentives and not others."
It's that potential that motivates him.
And so McCaa continues to travel, glad-hand, and negotiate. In some ways, he's practicing a timeless art: barter. "My experience buying pineapples in a market in Medell’n in the 1960s is proving to be very, very valuable," he says. "I can bargain with these people."
"Given what is going on next door, one could imagine that the response [to a visit to a meeting of Arab League ministers in Amman, Jordan] would be somewhat chilly."
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