Population Studies-A Journal of Demography最新文献

This study aimed to explore the phenomenon of birthdate misregistration, using birth data from 45,226,875 Polish citizens, that is, all those born 1900-2000 and registered in Poland's Universal Electronic System for Registration of the Population (PESEL). I transformed the data into a daily series of births, detrended by dividing each value by the daily average for the relevant year. Next, I selected the dates with the highest deviations based on the coefficients of the linear regression model with dummy variables. Finally, I estimated the size of the phenomenon in subsequent years by comparing the numbers of births on selected dates to their expected values. This paper is the first to document the specificity, scale, duration, and probable causes of birthdate misregistration in Poland in the twentieth century.

Most research on trends in socio-economic fertility differences has focused on cohort total fertility and on women. This study aimed to analyse how cohort trends in parity-specific fertility differ across educational segments for men and women and what role multi-partner fertility plays in these trends. We used Finnish and Swedish register data on cohorts born in 1940-73/78. The main analyses used parity progression ratios, comparing ordinary ratios with similar ratios using births to first reproductive partners only. Among the low and medium educated, we observe strengthening parity polarization across cohorts, with increases in both childlessness and births of order three or higher, the latter largely reflecting increases in multi-partner fertility. Highly educated men and women more often have exactly two children. We demonstrate that cohort total fertility can mask significant parity-specific trends across educational groups and that changes in multi-partner fertility can play a part in cohort trends in socio-economic fertility differentials.

International migration has increased since 1990, with increasing numbers of migrants originating from low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). Efforts to explain this compositional shift have focused on wage gaps and other push and pull factors but have not adequately considered the role of demographic factors. In many LMICs, child mortality has fallen without commensurate economic growth and amid high fertility. This combination increases young adult populations and is associated with greater outmigration: in the poorest countries, we estimate that a one-percentage-point increase in the five-year lagged growth rate of the population of 15-24-year-olds was associated with a 15 per cent increase in all-age outmigrants, controlling for other factors. Increases in growth of young adult populations led to 20.4 million additional outmigrants across 80 countries between 1990 and 2015. Understanding the determinants of these migration shifts should help policymakers in origin and destination countries to maximize their potential positive effects.

In this paper, I examine progress in the field of mortality over the past 25 years. I argue that we have been most successful in taking advantage of an increasingly data-rich environment to improve aggregate mortality models and test pre-existing theories. Less progress has been made in relating our estimates of mortality risk at the individual level to broader mortality patterns at the population level while appropriately accounting for contextual differences and compositional change. Overall, I find that the field of mortality continues to be highly visible in demographic journals, including Population Studies. However much of what is published today in field journals could just as easily appear in neighbouring disciplinary journals, as disciplinary boundaries are shrinking.

This paper examines the position of migration in population studies, focusing on the period 1996-2021. It considers the reasons why migration remains problematic for demographers, but also how approaches to migration have changed over the last 25 years. While it has arguably become more important to both demography and population studies because of the transition to low fertility and mortality, migration has metamorphosed into a complex field in its own right, almost independently from changes in demography. Both internal and international migration form the subject of this examination and four main themes are pursued: data and measurement; theories and approaches; migration and development; and migration and political demography. The papers published in the journal Population Studies are used to provide a mirror through which to view these changes over the last 25 years. This paper concludes by looking at likely future directions in migration studies, demography, and population studies.

Demography was heavily involved in the eugenics movement of the early twentieth century but, along with most other social science disciplines, largely rejected eugenic thinking in the decades after the Second World War. Eugenic ideology never entirely deserted academia, however, and in the twenty-first century, it is re-emerging into mainstream academic discussion. This paper aims, first, to provide a reminder of demography's early links with eugenics and, second, to raise awareness of this academic resurgence of eugenic ideology. The final aim of the paper is to recommend ways to counter this resurgence: these include more active discussion of demography's eugenic past, especially when training students; greater emphasis on critical approaches in demography; and greater engagement of demographers (and other social scientists) with biologists and geneticists, in order to ensure that research which combines the biological and social sciences is rigorous.

In the 50th anniversary edition of Population Studies, John Hobcraft commented that demographers spend too little time trying to explain the phenomena they measure and describe. A quarter of a century on, this paper looks at the state of theory and explanation in contemporary demography. I ask how demographers have approached the task of explanation since Hobcraft's comment, grounding the discussion in the mainstream literature on low fertility in Europe. Using selected examples, I critically review macro- and micro-level approaches to explanation, highlighting some of the philosophical problems that each encounters. I argue that different conceptions of what demography is, and the explanatory language fertility researchers use, lead to differences in explanatory strategies that are rarely explicitly recognized. I also consider how critical theories challenge demographers to think in new ways. Despite the increasing attention paid to theory and explanation, I conclude that more engagement with the philosophy of social sciences is needed before fertility researchers can legitimately claim their studies do as much to explain and understand as to quantify and describe.

Despite common perceptions to the contrary, pandemic diseases do not affect populations indiscriminately. In this paper, we review literature produced by demographers, historians, epidemiologists, and other researchers on disparities during the 1918-20 influenza pandemic and the Covid-19 pandemic. Evidence from these studies demonstrates that lower socio-economic status and minority/stigmatized race or ethnicity are associated with higher morbidity and mortality. However, such research often lacks theoretical frameworks or appropriate data to explain the mechanisms underlying these disparities fully. We suggest using a framework that considers proximal and distal factors contributing to differential exposure, susceptibility, and consequences as one way to move this research forward. Further, current pandemic preparedness plans emphasize medically defined risk groups and epidemiological approaches. Therefore, we conclude by arguing in favour of a transdisciplinary paradigm that recognizes socially defined risk groups, includes input from the social sciences and humanities and other diverse perspectives, and contributes to the reduction of health disparities before a pandemic hits.

The human population is at the centre of research on global environmental change. On the one hand, population dynamics influence the environment and the global climate system through consumption-based carbon emissions. On the other hand, the health and well-being of the population are already being affected by climate change. A knowledge of population dynamics and population heterogeneity is thus fundamental to improving our understanding of how population size, composition, and distribution influence global environmental change and how these changes affect population subgroups differentially by demographic characteristics and spatial distribution. The increasing relevance of demographic research on the topic, coupled with availability of theoretical concepts and advancement in data and computing facilities, has contributed to growing engagement of demographers in this field. In the past 25 years, demographic research has enriched climate change research-with the key contribution being in moving beyond the narrow view that population matters only in terms of population size-by putting a greater emphasis on population composition and distribution, through presenting both empirical evidence and advanced population forecasting to account for demographic and spatial heterogeneity. What remains missing in the literature is research that investigates how global environmental change affects current and future demographic processes and, consequently, population trends. If global environmental change does influence fertility, mortality, and migration, then population estimates and forecasts need to adjust for climate feedback in population projections. Indisputably, this is the area of new research that directly requires expertise in population science and contribution from demographers.