Background: There is a long-standing debate about the role of spacing and stopping in the fertility transition, fueled by a lack of methods to appropriately model spacing and stopping. Traditional event-history analysis cannot distinguish between the two processes in analyzing the determinants of birth risks, and attempts to separately model spacing and stopping have been criticized from a methodological

Background: Although the matrix model for kinship networks includes many demographic processes, it is deterministic. It provides values of age-stage distributions of kin, but no information on (co)variances. Because kin populations are small, demographic stochasticity is expected to create appreciable inter-individual variation. Objective: To develop a stochastic kinship model that includes demographic

Background: Mobile phone surveys are gaining traction in low- and middle-income countries, but mobile phone ownership (MPO) is not universal, potentially introducing sample selection bias in ensuing estimates. Objective: To evaluate MPO-associated sample selection bias in adult mortality estimates from sibling survival histories (SSH) administered to women of reproductive age. Methods: Using data from

Background: Over the past few decades, cohort fertility rates in the different countries of the United Kingdom (England and Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland) have diverged, yet the role of parity-specific patterns, including childlessness, is not known. Studies across Europe have found a reversal in the educational gradient of childlessness from positive to negative, which has been attributed

Background: Married and cohabiting partners frequently share the responsibility of caring for their aging parents. Adult children’s union formation and partner selection decisions have important implications for their ability to care for their aging parents. However, extant research has yet to examine how adult children’s partner selection decisions influence the levels of financial, emotional, and

Background: A central question in family research is whether parents’ social disadvantages, such as being a single parent or having low education, are becoming more concentrated over time. Objective: We contribute to this literature by examining long-term trends in the gap in single parenthood between more educated and less-educated mothers since the 1970s to around 2015, placing special emphasis on

Background: Ongoing mortality trends affect the distribution of age at death, typically described by parametric models. Cohort effects can markedly perturb the distribution and reduce the fit of such models, and this needs to be specifically taken into account. Objective: This study examines the integration of cohort effects in a three-component parametric model for the age-at-death distribution, applying

Background: There is a large body of research on the gendered division of domestic labor, but differences between women’s and men’s reported contributions to childcare and housework remain a puzzle. Objective: This study examines the reporting gap in the division of housework and childcare to understand how this gap changes across the transition to parenthood and how it is influenced by the couples’

Background: In 2020, as the SARS-CoV-2 virus spread globally, many countries around the world experienced substantial increases in mortality, including in Latin America. In that year, many non-pharmaceutical measures were implemented in Uruguay. The first COVID-19 vaccines were administered in February 2021. Uruguay has various characteristics that were pointed out as risk factors in the course of

Background: To increase the lowest fertility rate in the European Union in 2015, combat poverty, and invest in children’s human capital, the Polish government launched a pronatalist cash transfer program in 2016. Objective: What are the short-term fertility effects of the Family 500+ cash transfer? Which groups of women responded to the cash transfer? Methods: Using the Polish Household Budget Survey

Background: Although prison inmates are known to be disadvantaged in multiple ways, we know less about changes in the socioeconomic backgrounds of prisoners over time. We examine these changes in a period characterized by a decreasing prisoner rate, the introduction of community service, and strong macroeconomic fluctuations. Objective: We analyze changes in the socioeconomic backgrounds of individuals

Background: The relationship between income and fertility appears to be changing across rich societies at the national and regional levels. However, less is known about how the individual-level relationship between income and fertility has changed over time. Objective: To examine how the relationship between income and fertility changed between 2008 and 2022 in the Netherlands, and how this trend differs

Background: How cohesive are families and how do they respond to their members’ needs? How do families transmit advantages and disadvantages within and across generations? Current data confine our answers to these questions to solidarity and transmission in the immediate family, overlooking other relatives who play a significant role in socialization, social integration, social support, and the reproduction

Background: Indicators of longevity like the life expectancy at birth or the modal age at death are always positively affected by improvements in mortality. Instead, for lifespan variation it has been shown that there exists a threshold age above and below which averting deaths respectively increases or decreases such variation. Objective: Within a Gompertz force of mortality setting, we aim to provide

Background: In Europe, the transition to adulthood has been steadily prolonged. Comparative studies have not addressed in detail the role of parental socioeconomic status (SES) and gender in the postponement of events linked to the transition to adulthood. Objective: Our aim is to evaluate whether the timing and the risk of experiencing home-leaving, labour market entry, first coresidential union,

Background: To enhance its data capability, Australia recently set up a longitudinal administrative micro-dataset, the Person Level Integrated Data Asset (PLIDA). Objective: To ensure that users in both scholarly and applied settings understand how PLIDA can be reliably used, we assess its Combined Location Module, which provides place of residence by combining three administrative datasets since 2006

Background: In Korea, where marriage and childbirth are inextricably linked, the number of childless women is rising. Aside from the increase in permanent unmarried women, the prevalence of late marriage limits a woman’s reproductive period, raises the risk of infertility, and can lead to childlessness. As Korea experienced the universalisation of higher education, the prolongation of education may

Background: In 2008, world food prices skyrocketed. There is little consensus on the effect of the 2008 food price crisis on poverty, food security, and population health. Objective: To estimate the effects of the 2008 crisis on maternal nutrition and child anemia in Senegal. Methods: Child hemoglobin reflects in utero iron deposition, making it a biomarker for maternal nutrition. By comparing the

Background: Spain has one of the most enduring low levels of fertility in the world, but desired fertility there is still close to two children. Objective: We document recent fertility trends and examine the reasons that women and men provide for not achieving their desired fertility. Methods: We use data from the 2018 Spanish Fertility Survey (14,556 women and 2,619 men). We provide a cohort and age

Background: Seasonality of mortality is a well-research topic. However, there are few cross-national studies on total populations that would allow a clear comparison of the results. This article replicates Rau and Doblhammer (2003) and adjusts their methods to Polish data nearly two decades later. Objective: The article addresses the following questions about the seasonality of deaths in Poland: How

Background: Sequence analysis is a set of tools increasingly used in demography and other social sciences to analyse longitudinal categorical data. Typically, single (e.g., education trajectories) or multiple parallel temporal processes (e.g., work and family) are analysed by using crisp clustering algorithms that reduce complexity by partitioning cases into exhaustive and mutually exclusive groups

Background: The COVID-19 pandemic was accompanied by widespread childcare and school closures. Emerging evidence – primarily from high-income countries – suggests that these changes increased women’s time in unpaid care, which may be a particular challenge for women with paid employment. Objective: The paper examines how women’s unpaid care responsibilities and employment changed during the pandemic

Background: Many sub-Saharan African countries have large populations of young people, and these cohorts have the potential to bring significant change. Understanding the changing lives of young people is important for ensuring individuals experience healthy and successful transitions to adulthood and for understanding how best to ensure they realise their full potential, for themselves and their communities

Background: Adult obesity has been increasing in the United States since the 1980s. Its future prevalence will be a key determinant for public health. For the cohorts now in young adulthood, the future prevalence of obesity will depend on current prevalence and future increase in weight. Methods: We pooled 92,615 body-mass index (BMI) measures from 26,337 adults interviewed and examined by the National

Background: Research on parents’ divisions of domestic labor during the COVID-19 pandemic has focused on average changes in housework and child care during the pandemic’s first year, limiting our understanding of variation in parents’ experiences as well as the long-term consequences of the pandemic for gender inequality. Objective: This study identifies distinct patterns of change in US parents’ divisions

Background: International migration is influenced by economic and social factors that change over time. However, given the complexity of these relationships, global population scenarios to date include only stylized migration assumptions that do not account for changes in the drivers of migration. On the other hand, existing projection models of international migration do not resolve all demographic

Background: Uruguay was one of the pioneers of the demographic transition in Latin America and the Caribbean. It experienced very early declines in both fertility and mortality, but teenage fertility remained high until recently. Objective: We study the short- and long-term determinants of fertility at different reproductive age stages (less than 20 years old, 20 to 29 years old, and 30 years old and

Background: Omissions and misreported ages in both death and exposure data cause bias in mortality and life expectancy estimates. Most discussions of data errors have focused on a single type of error only, and most rely on empirical examples rather than formal analysis. Objective: We wish to analyze data errors and their interactions in a single, coherent framework in which all three of the major

Background: We investigate the contribution of socio-behavioral factors to changes in US adult mortality over the period 1997–2019 using National Health Interview Surveys for the years 1997–2018 linked to death records through 2019. The variables studied include alcohol consumption, cigarette smoking, health insurance coverage, educational attainment, mental distress, obesity, and race/ethnicity. We

Background: The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the importance of civil registration and vital statistics (CRVS) systems for tracking and monitoring mortality outcomes during a public health crisis, especially in low- and middle-income countries. Alternative mortality data sources, such as censuses and surveys, offer an opportunity to assess the impact of health crises on countries with incomplete CRVS

Background: Global climate change poses grave risks to population health, especially in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). It both threatens the sustainability of nascent epidemiological transitions and raises prospects for counter transitions driven by indirect climate impacts on mortality, such as those from reemerging infectious diseases and by direct impacts of extreme climatic events. Objective:

Objective: This paper describes the new Sudan Labor Market Panel Survey (SLMPS) 2022, the first nationally representative survey in Sudan in almost a decade. Methods: The paper details the design of the survey, including the topics covered by this multipurpose household survey and the complexities of the sampling strategy, which over-sampled refugees and the internally displaced. The training, fieldwork

Objective: This paper investigates and predicts the impact of family policies and the economic situation on women’s reproductive behavior in Tehran Province, Iran. Methods: The low fertility behavior of women in terms of simultaneous interaction among such agents as household, women, and government is modeled using a multi-agent-based modeling. The probability, heterogeneity, uncertainty, and interactions

Background: The gender gap in mental health that emerged in Germany during the pandemic grew disproportionally among partnered parents. The question arises as to why mothers – compared to fathers – experienced greater declines in mental health when guiding their families through the pandemic. Objective: This study investigates how changes in childcare arrangements affected parental mental health during

Background: As more people recognise the challenges of climate change, an increasing number are trying to reduce their ecological footprint. However, it remains uncertain whether this extends to decisions about having children. Despite public debate, scholarly research remains scarce. Objective: Our aim is to explore whether and how vignettes about climate change impact short-term fertility desires

Background: Population projections for all countries are published by the United Nations Population Division (UNPD) every two years as part of the World Population Prospects (WPP). Since 2015, probabilistic population projections have been published as part of WPP, produced using Bayesian statistical models. Central to this methodological change was a team of statisticians at the University of Washington

Background: Due to restrictive laws and limited service provision, globally the majority of induced abortions are unsafe and remain largely undocumented, despite their negative impact on women’s health. Objective: The purpose of this study is to test Respondent-Driven Sampling – used previously in HIV research – for abortion, and to measure abortion safety characteristics in the small town of Kaya

Background: Many health and demographic surveys routinely collect information on women’s exposure to family planning (FP) messages, counseling on contraceptive side effects, discussions about FP with providers, contraceptive decision-making autonomy, and the desire for additional children. Several studies have shown significant associations with current contraceptive use status from these cross-sectional

Background: In recent years, lifespan inequality has become an important indicator of population health. Uncovering the statistical properties of lifespan inequality measures can provide novel insights on the study of mortality. Methods: We introduce the ‘Average Uneven Mortality’ (AUM) index, a novel mortality indicator for the study of mortality patterns and lifespan inequality. We prove some new

Background: The Makeham term serves as a fundamental component in mortality modeling, offering a constant additive hazard that accounts for background mortality factors usually unrelated to the aging process. This term, widely employed in mortality analysis, provides a crucial mechanism for capturing mortality risks unrelated to age-related deterioration. Objective: The objective of this paper is to

Background: In the light of recent concerns about the reliability of scientific research, the open science movement has attracted considerable attention and interest from a variety of sources, including researchers, research institutions, the business industry, intergovernmental organizations, the media and the public. However, the current extent of openness in demographic research remains unknown

Background: Decreasing fertility rates and increasing lifespan affect the time grandparents and grandchildren co-exist. Any changes in the time and length of grandparenthood could alter the quality and the direction of intergenerational exchange. In Italy, a country in which grandparents constitute a fundamental resource for the provision of childcare and where families are the main source of support

Background: Conventional decomposition analysis identifies contributions from differences in covariates in total between-population difference, but does not address the question of the historical roots of the differences. To close this gap, the contour decomposition method was proposed. Since 2017, when it was published, this method has been successfully applied in several papers. Nevertheless, it

Background: Infant mortality rates (IMRs) vary dramatically across US states. A potential explanation centers on compositional differences in births from sociodemographic groups with a high risk of infant mortality. Objective: I seek to identify the contribution of key compositional factors to state-level disparities in IMRs using a series of Kitagawa–Blinder–Oaxaca decompositions. Methods: Drawing

Background: Data from social media have emerged as an auxiliary source for real-time information on migrant populations. Facebook users’ tagged ‘expat’ data – an ‘expat’ being someone who lived in country x but now lives in country y – has been used to estimate immigrants and its quality assessment has relied on household surveys and UNDESA migration estimates. Objective: Using the census as the gold

Background: It is widely recognized that migrants are generally healthy upon arrival, but for several reasons, a longer length of stay abroad can have detrimental effects on health. Empirical evidence suggests the use of different comparison groups (natives in the destination country; co-nationals in the origin country) to analyse migrants’ health, depending on research aims and data availability.

Background: Subjective survival probabilities incorporate individuals’ view about own future survival and they are associated with actual mortality patterns. Objective: The objective of this study is twofold. First, we apply a Bayesian methodology to incorporate the respondents’ views about future survival, and second, we investigate whether subjective survival information is useful for predicting

Background: Even though same-sex couples face clear obstacles to parenthood, little is known about the extent to which preferences and obstacles can explain the lower levels of parenthood among individuals in same-sex couples. Objective: The objective is to document routes into parenthood and to quantify the gap between observed and desired number of children among women in different-sex and same-sex

Background: Research suggests that, following major changes in women’s roles in developed societies, gender relations within heterosexual partnerships are entering a second stage, during which men’s roles are the main source of change. Some scholars suggest that changes in gender roles occur differentially across social classes, as reflected in variation across educational groups. Objective: We ask

Background: If a new job is located in a different region from the place of residence, individuals or households can choose between moving or commuting. However, so far mobility alternatives and their drivers remain under-researched from a comparative perspective. Objective: We investigate the determinants of the mobility choices of individuals who have taken a distant job (50 km or more), considering

Background: Fertility histories are subject to measurement errors such as incorrect birth dates, incorrect birth orders, incorrect sex, and omissions. These errors can bias demographic estimates such as fertility rates and child mortality rates. Objective: We focus on births missing in fertility histories. We estimate the prevalence of such omissions and study their associated factors. Methods: We

Background: Fertility decline in sub-Saharan Africa has been slower than in other regions, with the periods of extremely slow transitions frequently described as stalled. Lack of investment in family planning programs has been proposed as a key contributing factor. However, while there is a large literature on fertility transition stalls, similar phenomena in contraceptive prevalence trends have received

Background: Period mean age at death (MAD) is affected by a population’s age structure, and therefore by its mortality, fertility, and migration history. Period life expectancy (e_0) is also a mean age at death, for a standardized population with a stationary age structure. It depends only on current mortality rates. Here, we explore a middle ground: an age-standardized measure of period age at death

Background: Growing empirical evidence shows that the decision to migrate is influenced by parents’ international migration experiences, with the second generation being more likely to migrate than individuals with no migration background. However, the factors underpinning this intergenerational transmission of migration behaviour remain poorly understood. Objective: This study extends existing evidence

Background: For commonly used mortality models, the existing estimates change with the recalibration of new data. This issue is also known as the lack of the new-data-invariant property. Objective: We adapt the Lee–Carter, age-period-cohort, Renshaw–Haberman, and Li–Lee models to achieve the new-data-invariant property. The resulting fitted or forecast mortality indexes are tractable and comparable

Objective: The aim was to examine how parental cancer affects the mental health of offspring aged 6–30, and age variations in this effect. Methods: Individual fixed-effects models were estimated from register data covering the entire Norwegian population in 2010–2018. The outcome variable was whether the individual (offspring) had at least one consultation within a year with a general practitioner

Background: Greater levels of education are associated with lower risk of dementia, but less is known about how education is also associated with the compression of dementia incidence. Objective: We extend the literature on morbidity compression by evaluating whether increased levels of education are associated with greater dementia compression. We evaluate these patterns across race and gender groups

BACKGROUND Greater levels of education are associated with lower risk of dementia, but less is known about how education is also associated with the compression of dementia incidence. OBJECTIVE We extend the literature on morbidity compression by evaluating whether increased levels of education are associated with greater dementia compression. We evaluate these patterns across race and gender groups

Background: Most studies on health expectancies rely on self-reported health from surveys to measure the prevalence of disabilities or ill health in a population. At best, such studies only correct for sample selection based on a limited number of characteristics observed on the invitees. Objective: Using longitudinal data from the Trøndelag Health Study (HUNT), I investigate the extent to which adjustments

Background: Life expectancy at birth (e0), life years lost at death (e†), and lifetable entropy (H) are key indicators that capture average lifespan and lifespan variation. Expressions and relationships among these summary measures form the basis to analytically derive a range of formal demographic relationships, that build on each other and together help create new insights. Even though many elegant