"Using
Data to Make
Sports Safer:
Toward a
National Registry of Catastrophic
Youth Sports Injuries"
Audio and powerpoint recording from the BCTR Talks at
Twelve series.
Recorded May 9,
2013
Catastrophic and near-catastrophic youth sports injuries are a significant and serious problem in the
United States.
Despite the widespread prevalence of severely debilitating injuries to kids in sports (such as football, soccer, hockey, lacrosse, pole vaulting, gymnastics, and even cheerleading), research into the problem is hampered by a lack of high quality, nationally representative microdata that could be used to inform rule changes, improve equipment design, and implement better policy guidelines governing youth sports.
We will talk about our efforts to access and analyze administrative records from emergency department and hospital inpatient databases in
Minnesota and
New York State. As with most administrative records that are used for research, the primary intent of the system is not research and often data quality issues arise. A principal purpose of the records we are accessing is to satisfy requirements for payment by insurance providers. The injury coding scheme (
ICD-9 CM) holds great promise yet prior research regarding data on traumatic brain injury (
TBI) conducting comprehensive reviews of medical charts has shown that the true level of incidents is greater than what is shown by the administrative record codes.
This project is a joint effort between the
Cornell Institute for
Social and Economic
Research (CISER),
Weill Cornell Medical College, and the
Mayo Clinic.
William Block serves as director of the Cornell Institute for Social and Economic Research (CISER), a position he has held since 2008. CISER provides a high capacity shared computing system to Cornell social scientists and medical researchers and their colleagues worldwide; an innovative restricted data service with support for multiple modes of secure access; and a data archive that is more than 30 years old.
At Cornell
Block has served as a founding member of the Research
Data Management Services
Group (RDMSG), a member of the
Library Strategic Planning Task Force,
Core Director of the Cornell
Population Center (
CPC), and
Executive Director of Cornell's Census Research
Data Center (
RDC), located within CISER. Block is a co-PI on Cornell's NSF-Census Research
Network (NCRN) project aimed at the difficult curation problem associated with restricted data and metadata, and a PI on a project to gather data on catastrophic youth sports injuries in collaboration with
USA Hockey. He is also engaged in research efforts to improve the ability of medical scientists to understand concussions in youth sports; a project to gather runaway slave ads from the
19th century United States; and a project to build an African demographic data archive in
Francophone countries.
Block was recently re-elected
President of the
International Association of
Social Science Information,
Service, and
Technology (
IASSIST), and serves on the Expert Committee and the
Steering Committee of
the Data Documentation
Initiative (
DDI), an international metadata specification for the social and behavioral sciences.
Prior to Cornell, Block worked for nearly 20 years in a variety of capacities on the many data infrastructure projects of the
Minnesota Population Center, including
IPUMS-USA,
NHGIS, and IHIS.
Warren A.
Brown is a
Senior Research Associate at CISER since July
2011. Prior to that Dr. Brown directed
Cornell University's
Program on Applied Demographics, representing New York State to the
Census Bureau's cooperative programs on population estimates and projections before his appointment as director of
the Applied Demography Program at
University of Georgia from
June 2009 to 2011. Dr. Brown is an active member of the demography profession and frequent collaborator with and consultant to staff at the
U.S. Census Bureau. Dr. Brown serves as President of the
Association of
Public Data Users, having previously served on the Steering Committee for the Census Bureau's
State Data Center Program, and as
Chair of the
Population Association of America's Committee on Applied
Demography. Dr. Brown is the author of a handbook for researchers on the
American Community Survey, published by the Census Bureau in May 2009. Dr. Brown has been selected by the
National Academy of Sciences Committee on
National Statistics to serve on an expert panel to evaluate the
2010 Census and plan for the Census in
2020.
- published: 10 May 2013
- views: 148