EPC2026 workshop on SOCSIM demographic microsimulation in RBologna, Italy, 3 June 2026
As a part of the IUSSP Panels on Digital and Computational Demography and Kinship Structures, Dynamics, and Inequalities, the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (MPIDR) hosted an interactive pre-conference workshop on "Demographic microsimulations in R using SOCSIM – Modelling population and kinship dynamics" at the European Population Conference in Bologna, Italy. Course instructors Tom Theile (MPIDR), Liliana Calderón-Bernal (MPIDR), Mallika Snyder (MPIDR), and Ridhi Kashyap (University of Oxford), in collaboration with Emilio Zagheni (MPIDR) and Diego Alburez-Gutierrez (MPIDR), introduced participants to microsimulation and the “rsocsim” R package, and highlighted how it could be used to inform their research.
First developed in the 1970s at the University of California, Berkeley, SOCSIM is a powerful open-source tool for modelling individual demographic events and producing synthetic populations with plausible age and kinship structures, using population-level demographic rates as input. The new “rsocsim” package developed at MPIDR offers researchers a readily-accessible and user-friendly approach to running and analysing SOCSIM simulations, and offers rich potential for further research in areas such as kinship dynamics and inequalities.
20 participants attended the workshop. Attendees were primarily graduate students and early career researchers and faculty, drawn from research institutions across Europe, Asia, and the United States. In the course of the workshop, participants learned about various approaches to microsimulation and agent-based modelling; how to set up, run, and validate a simulation in SOCSIM; and how to analyse simulation output to study kin availability and loss.
The IUSSP Panels on Digital and Computational Demography and Kinship Structures, Dynamics, and Inequalities, under which this workshop was organized, look forward to supporting further training and research in this area. Stay tuned for future training opportunities, which will be advertised by the IUSSP!
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