Hybrid Format

Talk@MPIDR Maria Gargiulo

Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (MPIDR), Rostock, Germany, October 30, 2024

11:00 AM: Maria Gargiulo -  The Colombian armed conflict: Using statistical methods to unveil the truth

Abstract: Documenting human rights violations during armed conflict is difficult and can be dangerous, and the data that results is generally incomplete. Some records of violence are missing key information about the victim, the presumed perpetrator, or the context of the violence; some victims’ stories are undocumented altogether, leaving silences in the data. Furthermore, the documented data is unlikely to be statistically representative of the entirety of the victim population. Population-level statistical inference based on this data that does not first address the challenges posed by missing data can lead us to incorrect conclusions about patterns of violence.
This talk will introduce the use of multiple systems estimation (MSE) in conflict research with a focus on its application to the study of human rights violations during the armed conflict in Colombia. Additionally, it will demonstrate how MSE can be used as an input to more conventional demographic methods to quantify the impacts of violence on population health or to test potential relationships between violence and other phenomena.
 

Bio: Maria Gargiulo is a doctoral student in the Department of Population Health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Her research uses statistical and demographic methods to bring clarity to human rights violations in situations where data are messy, incomplete, or missing altogether. Her dissertation research focuses on the impacts of violence on population heath in Mexico. Outside of her academic work, Maria is a statistician for the Human Rights Data Analysis Group and serves on the American Statistical Association’s Committee on Scientific Freedom and Human Rights. Maria holds a B.S. in statistics and data science and Spanish from Yale University and an MPhil in sociology and demography from the University of Oxford.

Participation

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