Population Studies-A Journal of Demography最新文献

Fertility preferences have long played a key role in models of fertility differentials and change. We examine the stability of preferences over time using rich panel data on Kenyan women's fertility desires, expectations, actual fertility, and recall of desires in three waves over a nine-year period, when respondents were in their 20s. We find that although desired fertility is quite unstable, most women perceive their desires to be stable. Under hypothetical future scenarios, few expect their desired fertility to increase over time but, in fact, such increases in fertility desires are common. Moreover, when asked to recall past desires, most respondents report previously wanting exactly as many children as they desire today. These patterns of bias are consistent with the emerging view that fertility desires are contextual, emotionally laden, and structured by identity.

In any month, administrative data collected by government agencies contain a fraction of the polity's adults, namely those who have interacted with government agencies in that month. For researchers and policymakers who want to evaluate questions that require a spatial location of the whole population of adults at a given time (e.g. job-residence spatial mismatch, impacts of local policies), these fragmentary records are insufficient. Combining administrative data from several agencies in the State of Washington, United States (US), we impute residential histories by parameterizing the 'decay' in maintenance of an observed address. This process yields an imputed population whose demography and geographic distribution matches well with survey estimates. This work uses driving licence, voter, social services, and birth records to append address locations to Unemployment Insurance data, a process that could be replicated with administrative records in other US states and countries with sporadic address data from various agencies.

We test a conjecture to explain Turkey's decades-long 'underachievement' in early child mortality improvements. We argue that it is largely a consequence of cultural barriers to embracing available modern medical technology and healthcare practices. The empirical test rests on a reformulation of Coale's Ready-Willing-Able (RWA) framework for explaining fertility changes, which makes it suitable to understand mortality changes. We use structural equation modelling and Demographic and Health Surveys spanning 1993-2013 to estimate basic parameters of the reformulated framework. These parameters are then used to classify mothers into four groups with different configurations of RWA dimensions and different probabilities of adopting modern medical practices. We find that observed behaviours in these groups were consistent with RWA expectations. In addition, we find that an important contributor to Turkey's lagging mortality decline was a population distribution biased towards groups more reticent to adopting modern healthcare.

Evidence from theories of Developmental Origins of Health and Disease (DOHaD) suggests that experiencing adverse early life conditions subsequently leads to detrimental adult health outcomes. The bulk of empirical DOHaD literature does not consider the nature and magnitude of the impact of adverse early life conditions at the population level. In particular, it ignores the distortion of age and cohort patterns of adult health and mortality and the increased load of chronic illness and disability that ensues. In this paper, we use a microsimulation model combined with empirical estimates of incidence and prevalence of obesity, type 2 diabetes, and associated disability in low- and middle-income countries to assess the magnitude of delayed effects on adult healthy life expectancy and on compression (or expansion) of morbidity at older ages. The main goal is to determine if, in what ways, and to what extent delayed effects due to early conditions can influence cohorts' chronic illness and disability profiles.

Parents with two boys or two girls are more likely to have a third child than those with a 'sex mix'. However, little is known on whether these 'mixed-sex preferences' extend beyond the nuclear family. This study leverages the random variation in sex at birth to assess whether the sex of nieces and nephews, in combination with own children, matters for fertility choices. Using three-generational data from the US Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), I show that extended families (including grandparents, their children, and their grandchildren) are collectively more likely to have three or more grandchildren when lacking sex mix, whether the first two grandchildren are siblings or cousins. I explore the pathways for these offspring sex preferences, finding support for a preference for an uninterrupted line of male descendants. This multigenerational approach also contributes a new estimation strategy that causally estimates the effects of family sizes on outcomes beyond fertility.

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.