Population Studies-A Journal of Demography最新文献

This study investigates partnership changes and childbearing among immigrants and their descendants in the UK, France, and Germany. Our analysis of longitudinal data shows, first, significant diversity in family trajectories among immigrants and their descendants in Europe. Immigrants from other European countries and their descendants tend to cohabit prior to marriage, and their fertility in unions is often similar to that of the native population. In contrast, South Asians and Turkish populations exhibit marriage-centred family behaviour with elevated third-birth rates. Individuals of sub-Saharan African or Caribbean origin display higher rates of non-marital family transitions. Second, we observe some changes in partnership and childbearing patterns across migrant generations; these are stronger for fertility than for partnership patterns. Third, migration background is particularly associated with partnership patterns, whereas the destination country context influences childbearing patterns. We expect some patterns to persist across future migrant generations (e.g. preference for marriage vs cohabitation), whereas others are likely to vanish (e.g. large families).

The experience of losing a child is increasingly uncommon worldwide but is no less devastating for parents who experience it. An overlooked aspect of this phenomenon is its timing: at which age do bereft parents lose a child and how are these ages at loss distributed? We use demographic methods to explore the mean and variability of maternal age at child loss in 18 countries for the 1850-2000 birth cohorts. We find that the distribution of age of child loss is bimodal, with one component representing young offspring deaths and another representing adult offspring deaths. Offspring loss is transitioning from being a relatively common life event, mostly experienced by young mothers, to a rare one spread throughout the maternal life course. Moreover, there is no evidence of convergence in the variability of age at offspring loss. These results advance the formal demography of kinship and underline the need to support bereaved parents across the life course.

Ideal family sizes remain at or above two in most low-fertility settings, but sub-replacement fertility ideals have been reported for urban China. The presence of restrictive family planning policies has led to a debate as to whether such ideals are genuine. This study exploits the ending of the one-child policy and the beginning of a universal two-child policy in October 2015 to investigate whether relaxing the restrictions led to an increase in ideal family size. We apply difference-in-differences and individual-level fixed-effect models to longitudinal data from a near-nationwide survey. For married individuals aged 20-39, relaxing the restrictions from one to two children increased the mean ideal family size by around 0.2 and the proportion who desired two or more children by around 19 percentage points. Findings suggest that although reported ideal family sizes have been reduced by policy restrictions, sub-replacement ideal family sizes in urban China appear to be genuine.

This study examines two decades of change in social inequalities in life and health expectancy among older adults in Australia, one of the few countries that escaped an economic recession during the global financial crisis. We compare adults aged 45+ across three measures of individual socio-economic position-education, occupation, and household wealth-and use multistate life tables to estimate total life expectancy (TLE) and life expectancy free of limiting long-term illness (LLTI-free LE) based on 20 waves of the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia Survey (2001-20). Our findings highlight substantial social disparities in both TLE and LLTI-free LE in Australia. Grouping individuals by household wealth shows striking differentials in LLTI-free LE. We observe widening social disparities in healthy longevity over time by all three measures of socio-economic position. This diverging trend in healthy longevity is troubling against the backdrop of widening income and wealth inequalities in Australia.

A growing body of research documents the relevance of parental education as a marker of family socio-economic status for children's later-life health outcomes. A strand of this literature evaluates how the early-life environment shapes mortality outcomes during infancy and childhood. However, the evidence on mortality during the life course and old age is limited. This paper contributes to the literature by analysing the association between paternal education and children's old-age mortality. We use data from Social Security Administration death records over the years 1988-2005 linked to the United States 1940 Census. Applying a family(cousin)- fixed-effects model to account for shared environment, childhood exposures, and common endowments that may confound the long-term links, we find that having a father with a college or high-school education, compared with elementary/no education, is associated with a 4.6- or 2.6-month-higher age at death, respectively, for the child, conditional on them surviving to age 47.

During 2010-20, period fertility in England and Wales fell to its lowest recorded level. The aim of this paper is to improve our understanding of the decline in period fertility in two dimensions: differentials by the education of a woman's parents (family background) and by a woman's education in relation to that of her parents (intergenerational educational mobility). The analysis finds a substantial decline in fertility in each education group, whether defined by a woman's parents' education alone or by a woman's own education relative to her parents' education. Considering parents' and women's own education together helps differentiate fertility further than analysing either generation's education in isolation. Using these educational mobility groups more clearly shows a narrowing of TFR differentials over the decade, but timing differences persist.

In 1919-20, the European countries that were neutral in the First World War saw a small baby bust followed by a small baby boom. The sparse literature on this topic attributes the 1919 bust to individuals postponing conceptions during the peak of the 1918-20 influenza pandemic and the 1920 boom to recuperation of those conceptions. Using data from six large neutral countries of Europe, we present novel evidence contradicting that narrative. In fact, the subnational populations and maternal birth cohorts whose fertility was initially hit hardest by the pandemic were still experiencing below-average fertility in 1920. Demographic evidence, economic evidence, and a review of post-pandemic fertility trends outside Europe suggest that the 1920 baby boom in neutral Europe was caused by the end of the First World War, not by the end of the pandemic.

The number of people who undergo medically assisted reproduction (MAR) to conceive has increased considerably in recent decades. However, existing research into the demographics and the partnership histories of this growing subgroup is limited. Using unique data from Finnish population registers on nulliparous women born in Finland in 1971-77 (n = 21,129; ∼10 per cent of all women) who had undergone MAR treatment, we created longitudinal partnership histories from age 16 until first MAR treatment. We identified six typical partnership trajectories and used relative frequency sequence plots to investigate heterogeneity in partnership transitions within and between these groups. The majority of women (60.7 per cent) underwent MAR with their first partner, followed by women who underwent MAR in a second (21.5 per cent) or higher-order partnership (7.1 per cent), while 10.7 per cent underwent MAR without a partner. On average, women undergoing MAR were relatively young (with around half starting treatment before age 30) and were highly educated with high incomes.

Social isolation/marginalization in sub-Saharan Africa is under-researched, despite increasing evidence of weakening traditional community-based social support. This paper aims to develop a typology of social networks capable of accounting for social marginalization in a rural community in Western Senegal and to describe the socio-demographic characteristics of network profiles. Building on prior qualitative work, we carry out a latent profile analysis using a unique and extensive social network data set, identifying four different network profiles: Locally integrated, Constrained relationships, Locally marginalized, and Local elites. This paper provides the first empirically supported classification of social integration and marginalization in social networks in rural sub-Saharan Africa. In doing so, it can serve as a reference for future research seeking to understand both the broader scope of social integration and marginalization and the consequences of differential access to social capital through social networks on access to health resources and well-being.