Population Studies-A Journal of Demography最新文献

Although many contemporary demographers pay attention to historical demography, there is often a surprising lack of appreciation of the demographic circumstances and systems of the past, suggesting an implicit assumption that they are not relevant to the present or that the methods, data, and questions addressed by historical and contemporary demographers are different. This paper provides an overview of historical demography as published in Population Studies and how this has developed over time. Drawing on this, I demonstrate that historical and contemporary demography use similar data sources and identical methods, and they often address comparable questions. I argue that an appreciation of demographic patterns and processes is beneficial for all demographers, even those who work on the most recent time periods, and that better integration of historical and contemporary demography would be beneficial to both. The paper also considers three challenges for historical demography as it moves forward.

Population Studies advances research on fertility, mortality, family, migration, methods, policy, and beyond, yet it lacks a recent, rigorous review. We examine all papers published between 1947 and 2020 (N = 1,901) and their authors, using natural language processing, social network analysis, and mixed methods that combine unsupervised machine learning with qualitative coding. After providing a brief history, we map the evolution in authorship and papers towards shorter, multi-authored papers, also finding that females comprise 33.5 per cent of authorship across the period under study, with varied sex ratios across topics. Most papers examine fertility, mortality, and family, studying groups and change, but topics vary over time. Children are rarely studied, and research on women focuses on family planning, fertility decline, and unions, whereas key domains for research on men are migration, historical demography (war, famine), and employment. Research on Africa and Asia focuses on family planning, with work on fertility decline concentrated on North America and Europe, consistent with theories of demographic transition. Our resulting discussion identifies future directions for demographic research.

Over the past 25 years, technological improvements that have made the collection, transmission, storage, and analysis of data significantly easier and more cost efficient have ushered in what has been described as the 'big data' era or the 'data revolution'. In the social sciences context, the data revolution has often been characterized in terms of increased volume and variety of data, and much excitement has focused on the growing opportunity to repurpose data that are the by-products of the digitalization of social life for research. However, many features of the data revolution are not new for demographers, who have long used large-scale population data and been accustomed to repurposing imperfect data not originally collected for research. Nevertheless, I argue that demography, too, has been affected by the data revolution, and the data ecosystem for demographic research has been significantly enriched. These developments have occurred across two dimensions. The first involves the augmented granularity, variety, and opportunities for linkage that have bolstered the capabilities of 'old' big population data sources, such as censuses, administrative data, and surveys. The second involves the growing interest in and use of 'new' big data sources, such as 'digital traces' generated through internet and mobile phone use, and related to this, the emergence of 'digital demography'. These developments have enabled new opportunities and offer much promise moving forward, but they also raise important ethical, technical, and conceptual challenges for the field.

Voluntary family planning is a key mainstay of demographic work and population policies. The 1994 International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) signalled a decisive shift away from fertility reduction and target-setting to an emphasis on voluntary family planning as intrinsic to reproductive health and women's empowerment. Yet, criticisms of voluntary family planning programmes persist, interrogating how 'voluntariness' is understood and wielded or questioning the instrumentalization of women's fertilities in the service of economic and developmental goals. In this paper, I reflect on these debates with the aim of troubling the notion of voluntary family planning as an unambiguous good that enables equitable empowerment and development for all. Drawing on literature from cognate disciplines, I highlight how voluntariness is linked to social and structural conditions, and I challenge the instrumentalization of voluntary family planning as a 'common agenda' to solve 'development' problems. Engaging with this work can contribute to key concepts (e.g. 'voluntary') and measurements (e.g. autonomy), strengthening the collective commitment to achieving the ICPD and contributing to reproductive empowerment and autonomy. Through this intervention, I aim to help demographers see why some critics call for a reconsideration of voluntary family planning and encourage a decoupling of interventions from fertility reduction aims, instead centring human rights, autonomy, and reproductive empowerment.

Using panel data, this study tracks the impact of reproductive transitions on women's status in the household in India. Here, status refers to the social benefits that women experience by meeting societal expectations related to childbearing. The analysis shows that becoming a mother is associated with increased freedom of movement and access to enabling resources. The adoption of permanent contraception-a common life course event marking the end of childbearing in India-is associated with increased freedom of movement but has no association with changes in access to enabling resources. Household decision-making, another dimension of women's status examined in the paper, is less dynamic over time and there is limited evidence of its association with reproductive transitions. The findings illustrate the tight linkages between household power dynamics and the life course in the South Asian context, and highlight the centrality of women's role as mothers in determining their social position.

Testing theories about human senescence and longevity demands accurate information on older-adult mortality; this is rare in low- to middle-income countries where raw data may be distorted by defective completeness and systematic age misreporting. For this reason, such populations are frequently excluded from empirical tests of mortality and longevity theories, thus limiting their reach, as they reflect only a small and selected human mortality experience. In this paper we formulate an integrated method to compute estimates of older-adult mortality when vital registration and population counts are defective due to inaccurate coverage and/or systematic age misreporting. The procedure is validated with a simulation study that identifies a strategy to compute adjustments, which, under some assumptions, performs quite well. While the paper focuses on Latin American and Caribbean countries, the method is quite general and, with additional information and some model reformulation, could be applied to other populations with similar problems.

Adult stature has become a widely used indicator of childhood nutritional status in historical populations and may provide insights into health inequalities that are not discernible in mortality rates. However, most pre-twentieth-century British data on heights suffer from selection biases. Here we present unique evidence on heights of adult males by occupation from an unbiased sample of adult males in Dorset in 1798-99. The mean height of fully grown (married) men was very similar to that of older military recruits, and our sample therefore confirms the taller stature of English males relative to males of other European countries in the same period. In contrast to previous evidence of negligible or U-shaped socio-economic gradients in mortality in this period, we found a fairly linear gradient in height by socio-economic status, that is similar in magnitude to class differences in adult height among English males born in the mid-twentieth century.Supplementary material for this article is available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/00324728.2020.1823011.

The transition to adulthood around the world is increasingly characterized by young people's desire to form independent households. Forming such households in Egypt requires buying or building a dwelling or obtaining a rental unit. Policies governing housing markets, such as rent control, and limited financing options have historically made access to housing for young couples challenging. In this paper, we use a difference-in-difference approach to evaluate how the liberalization of rental markets in Egypt affected the timing of marriage. We find that Egypt's 1996 rental reforms accelerated marriages and led to a reversal in the trend of rising age at marriage.

Declines in HIV incidence have been slower than expected during the roll-out of antiretroviral treatment (ART) services in sub-Saharan African populations suffering generalized epidemics. Using data from a population-based, open cohort HIV sero-survey (2004-13), we found evidence for initial reductions in sexual activity and multiple sexual partnerships, followed by increases during the period of ART scale-up in areas of high HIV prevalence in Manicaland, east Zimbabwe. Recent population-level increases in condom use were also recorded, but largely reflected high use by the rapidly growing proportion of HIV-infected individuals on treatment. Sexual risk behaviour increased in susceptible uninfected individuals and in untreated (and therefore more infectious) HIV-infected men, which may have slowed the decline in HIV incidence in this area. Intensified primary HIV prevention programmes, together with strengthened risk screening, referral, and support services following HIV testing, could help to maximize the impact of 'test-and-treat' programmes in reducing new infections.