Internship

 Project 2: Work hard, Die hard: Occupation based mortality differences in historical Finland
Supervisors; Mark Spa, Susanna Ukonaho & Mirkka Lahdenperä

Occupations take up a large part of an individual’s life and therefor can impact human health. Farmers for example have been found to have lower morbidity and mortality rates but are at the same time exposed to occupational hazards and work under conditions making them vulnerable.
Farmer’s lung for example is a condition caused by working excessively with hay making the lungs more vulnerable. Fishermen at sea might be more likely to drown but also might live a lifestyle that makes them more prone to developing cancers.
How mechanisms like such affected human health in the past however has been rarely studied and therefore:

In this project you’ll explore the association between occupations and mortality of historical Finns. Increasing our understanding of how occupations might have shaped communities.
you’ll work with an outstanding Finnish historical data set from 1800-1850 containing ~1.4 million individuals with their cause of death recorded. For some also their occupation is present and at the start the challenge will be to clean, filter and assign these (for a few selected parishes).

You’ll learn to:
-       Work with a large data set in R containing individual level information
-       Apply statistical models that can help you examine this question (GLMM’s, most likely)
-       Critically interpret results on occupational effects and dive into the literature to find explanations

Are you a 2nd year master student and interested? Reach out!
Duration 4-6 months.
By email: marspa@utu.fi