Demography最新文献

China has the largest number of patients with dementia in the world, and the rate of growth is expected to escalate further as the population ages. The majority of dementia patients rely on their families for care and assistance. Using demographic models of kinship, we provide quantitative estimates of the burden of dementia, from 1990 up to 2050, by illustrating the number of kin accessible to dementia patients, the dementia prevalence among kinship networks, and the dependency ratio of kin with dementia to working-age kin without dementia. We then compare the estimates of dementia burden across 194 countries and territories, accounting for historical trends in, and future projections of, mortality, fertility, and dementia prevalence. Our findings suggest that, unlike in other aging societies, China's aging crisis is exacerbated by the fact that, in addition to the alarming rise in the number of older adults in need of care, the number of potential family caregivers is also dropping at an unprecedented pace. The increase in dementia dependency ratio is expected to exceed the increases in most other countries across East Asia, Western Europe, and the United States. These findings have important implications for understanding the evolution of care networks for older adults in China over time and from a cross-country comparative perspective.

A sizable number of children in low- and middle-income countries experience separation from their parents due to labor migration. While scholarship has examined parental migration effects during school years and adolescence, few studies have examined the effect of migration on developmental outcomes in early childhood, a critical period characterized by a high degree of developmental plasticity and sensitivity. In addition, almost all previous work has relied on cross-sectional data, treating migration-induced family living arrangements as a static, time-invariant measure. However, parental migration is often temporary and circular, exposing children to multiple transitions that vary in timing and duration. To address these two limitations in the literature, the present study follows a panel of more than 4,000 young children in the China Family Panel Survey from 2010 to 2018 and examines early childhood outcomes using a counterfactual causal-inference framework with time-varying exposure. My results show that the effect of parental migration on children's outcomes depends on whether one versus both parents migrated and at what child age the parental migration happened. Specifically, one-parent out-migration is less detrimental to child development than both-parent out-migration. Parental migration impacts specific developmental domains depending on children's sensitive periods of development, with early absence being most consequential for physical growth and later migration being most consequential for noncognitive skills. The study offers a causal framework to better understand migration as a time-varying process, contributes to family demography by theorizing parental migration as a unique source of family complexity, and deepens our understanding of the toll that parental absence takes on human capital.

In this research note we address measurement challenges in the study of residential segregation to advance our understanding of the segregation of Latino and Asian ethnic subgroups. Our primary purpose is to address some of the key methodological barriers to advancement in this area, and we also answer this question: Do we miss important patterns of segregation when we study Latino and Asian panethnic groups versus ethnic subgroups? Research has been hindered by problems with segregation index bias that are exacerbated when studying the segregation of smaller groups, as well as by a limited understanding of different patterns of uneven distribution that certain segregation indices, such as the dissimilarity index, cannot capture. Using a carefully chosen segregation index corrected for index bias, we find some variation in Latino and Asian ethnic subgroup segregation that warrants disaggregating panethnic groups, but more importantly we find that segregation of these groups is much lower than previously understood. This latter finding is because index bias and the choice of segregation index can have major impacts on our understanding of these patterns, with the separation index emerging as a superior method of measurement. These findings support the study of ethnic subgroup residential segregation, so long as researchers make careful decisions about segregation measurement.

Adverse childbearing experiences, such as preterm births and neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) stays, are especially prevalent among Black and Hispanic pregnant people. In this research note, we provide a novel way of considering racial and ethnic patterns regarding adverse childbearing experiences by analyzing the 1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY79; N = 3,637). We use latent class analysis to identify four specific classes of adverse experiences that are unequally distributed within and across racial and ethnic groups. These four classes-Minimal Complications, High Childbearing Complications, Complex Gestation, and Increased Medicalized Interventions-represent unique types of reproductive health outcomes and interactions within the reproductive health care system. Distributions across these classes reveal which racial and ethnic groups are most at risk for multiple pregnancy and gestational complications (e.g., late pregnancy losses, closely spaced births), highly medicalized childbearing experiences (e.g., C-sections, NICU stays), and a broad constellation of adverse childbearing-related outcomes. Our research note draws attention to how specific childbearing experiences cluster together, reflecting broader racial and ethnic structures and potentially mattering for future health and well-being outcomes.

Although a growing proportion of older adults lead active and productive lives until later ages, little is known about how they balance paid work, other forms of productive aging, family, and leisure, or how this balancing may affect the interconnectedness of different generations. Using longitudinal, population-based data from Denmark, we investigate informal intergenerational help provision over time and the factors influencing the observed change from 1997 to 2017 for adults aged 52-77. Applying the Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition technique, we analyze trends in intergenerational help by older adults and examine whether changes in helping behavior are attributable to active aging or other changes within the population. We observe distinctly different helping behavior trends by age: a lower percentage of individuals aged 52-62 provided help in 2017 than in 1997, whereas a larger percentage of those aged 67-77 provided help in 2017 than in 1997. Although the increase in work participation does not add to declining levels of help to adult children, declining grandparenthood had a significant negative effect on helping behavior. In contrast, for those with grandchildren, helping behavior intensified over time.

A growing body of research provides evidence of extensive economic and health disparities faced by migrant farmworkers and their families, underscoring the need for livable wages, health insurance, and better working conditions. Recently, programs have provided payment to workers from corporate-supported premiums, yet no studies have explored the impacts of such programs on the health of the communities they target. In this study, we investigate whether the implementation of a workers' rights organization program within the agriculture industry promoted health in farmworker communities by evaluating changes in infant health outcomes. Using restricted birth records data from the National Vital Statistics System from 2006 to 2018, we show that the adoption of the Fair Food Program was associated with reductions in low-weight births among foreign-born mothers from Latin America. These results underscore how strengthening labor and employment conditions for birthing parents can mitigate possible long-term or latent adverse health outcomes among U.S.-born children.

Although there are large Black‒White obesity inequities among women in the United States, the factors that explain this racialized health inequity are not well understood, most likely because previous research has generally focused on a limited number of adult obesity determinants. We posit that more fully explaining Black‒White female obesity inequities requires greater attention to multiple life course stages and obesity determinants, including upstream and proximate determinants. Results from this study support this notion. Our analysis of data from a national sample of Black and White women finds that socioeconomic and social disadvantages, such as living in disadvantaged neighborhoods and single-parent households as adolescents and having lower adult household income, explain the majority of group differences in obesity prevalence. Population health initiatives aimed at tackling racialized inequities in obesity will be most effective if they focus on systemic and structural determinants rather than individual-level behavioral factors alone. Moreover, interventions that target individuals earlier in the life course would help to alleviate Black‒White obesity inequities among women in the United States.

Developmental idealism theory poses a collection of schemas, known as developmental idealism (DI), as an important influence on demographic behavior and change. We test this proposition for fertility behavior by examining if individuals' endorsement of DI influences their subsequent progression to a birth. The assessed DI schemas include beliefs that low fertility is a cause and effect of societal development and a positive attitude toward fertility decline. We use panel data from the Chitwan Valley Family Study collected from 2008 to 2014 in Nepal-a period when fertility declined from about three to nearly two children per woman. Nepali policy has long emphasized a two-child ideal for achieving national development. Thus, we also examine if DI endorsement is more influential for women with two or more children compared with those with none or only one. DI endorsement did influence women's fertility. High DI endorsement reduced the probability of another birth by more than half among women with two or more children. By contrast, endorsement of DI did not affect women's progression to first and second births. This finding suggests the spread of DI culture may well have contributed to fertility decline by motivating many to limit their family size.

A large body of research shows that parental unemployment has negative consequences for children's mental health. However, we know much less about the reverse pattern in intergenerational crossover effects. This study fills the gap by showing how unemployment among adult children is related to parents' mental health, and how this relationship is moderated by the geographical distance separating parents from their children. We analyze longitudinal data from seven of the first eight waves of the SHARE survey for 16 European countries from 2004 to 2020. Our analytic sample consists of 299,755 distinct observations for 78,837 parent-child dyads. We employ correlated random-effects models, which control for unobserved fixed-in-time confounders and allow for interacting time-varying observed characteristics in an appropriate way. Our results show that, generally, adult children's unemployment affects parental mental health negatively. Adult children's unemployment has particularly strong negative consequences for the mental health of mothers who coreside with their children. Regarding fathers, relatively larger effects emerge in the group with children who live near enough to have regular interactions but not close enough to provide direct instrumental support. Our findings highlight the role of coresidence and distance in shaping the interrelatedness of economic well-being and health across generations.