2013 Praxis Award Winner Mark Edberg and Honorable Mention Recipient Laurie Schwede

2013 Praxis Award Winner Mark Edberg and Honorable Mention Recipient Laurie Schwede

The 2013 Praxis Award winner Mark Edberg, Associate Professor in the School of Public Health and Health Services at George Washington University, will speak on his project, “Using the Concept of Social Well-Being to Develop and Implement a Framework for UNICEF Planning and Evaluating Efforts to Achieve Rights and Development Goals for Children and Families.” Working in collaboration with UNICEF, Edberg used anthropological methods to research and develop holistic, social well-being tools for planning and monitoring projects for adolescents in one version and woman and children in another.

Also speaking will be Honorable Mention Laurie Schwede, Principal Researcher for the Center for Survey Measurement, U.S. Census Bureau, on her project, “Comparative Ethnographic Studies of Enumeration Methods and Coverage across Race/Ethnic Groups.” Schwede, Rodney Terry, and a team of 16 independent ethnographers and 12 Census staff worked on a 2010 Census evaluation. For the first time in a decennial census, ethnographers conducted field observation studies, systematically observing live census interviews and debriefing respondents to identify types and sources of possible coverage error.  The goal was to identify characteristics of households, persons, and groups at risk of miscounts and reasons for possible miscounts, in order to improve enumeration methods and coverage research for the 2020 Census.

For more details on their work and other Praxis Awardees, see the WAPA Praxis web page at http://www.wapadc.org/2013PraxisAward.

About the speakers:

Mark Edberg, PhD, MA, is Associate Professor at the George Washington University School of Public Health and Health Services, with secondary appointments in the Department of Anthropology and the Elliott School of International Affairs. He is an applied and academic cultural anthropologist who has focused on social inequities and marginalized/excluded populations, and on social ecologies associated with health risks – including specific work related to HIV/AIDS, youth violence, substance abuse, school dropout, health disparities, and other issues (both domestic and global). He has directed studies, interventions and capacity building efforts for CDC, NIH, SAMHSA, the U.S. Office of Minority Health, the Administration for Children, Youth and Families (DHHS), and the National Institute of Justice, as well as research, evaluation and planning work for UNICEF and the Organization of American States. He has authored several books and numerous journal articles, among them his first book (primarily drawn from dissertation research): "El Narcotraficante: Narcocorridos and the Construction of a Cultural Persona on the U.S. Mexico Border" (U. of Texas Press, 2004).  Dr. Edberg is a fellow of the Society for Applied Anthropology.

Laurie  Schwede  earned  her  Anthropology  Master's   Degree  at  the  University  of  Colorado, influenced by Bob Hackenberg to work in applied demographic anthropology, qualitative and quantitative  methods, and in Southeast  Asia. She earned her Cornell  University Anthropology Ph.D.  after  conducting  Minangkabau  household  research  in  Indonesia.  Since  1989,  she  has worked  as  a  Census  Bureau  researcher.  She  designed  and  managed  controlled-comparison, mixed  methods  evaluations  on  complex  households  by  race  in  the  2000  Census  and  on differential census coverage by race and household structure in the 2010 Census. She co-edited Complex Ethnic Households in America and participates in a 2020 Census R&D group.