From Larry Hamilton

Thanks to Larry Atkinson for disseminating the discussions going on with various ACCIS participants. Taking this a step farther, perhaps we participants can start e-mailing to each other directly about our particular interests or concerns.

I am a sociologist currently working with a project studying northern Atlantic fishing communities. As a first step in this project, we are putting together statistical datasets covering all the communities in Maine, Newfoundland, Greenland, Iceland and Norway. Variables in these datasets include demographic, social, economic and health indicators, so they could be applied to study a range of different social or public-health research questions. European colleagues are working on database projects covering European Union countries, as well as some in Eastern Europe. Of course, the quality and availability of data vary greatly from one country to the next.

It would be valuable to have similar data on Chile, both for comparison with other places, and as background information for any socioeconomic research. I'm writing this note to ask a naive question about the "statistical culture" of Chile. Do public data exist on population, social, economic and health indicators in the ACCIS area? Are these at the level of individual communities or larger administrative regions? What about time series of population (including age, sex and ethnicity) for particular regions or communities? Perhaps some of the Chilean researchers on our network could write to me directly, to share their ideas about these and other questions before we get to to the actual workshop.

cheers,

Larry Hamilton

Larry.Hamilton@unh.edu

University of New Hampshire