Demography最新文献

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.

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 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.

Steep increases in the use of long-acting reversible contraceptives (LARCs) have occurred during the past two decades in the United States, driven in part by LARC-focused contraceptive access programs and policies designed to reduce early and unintended pregnancies and births. These outcomes have long been concentrated among women of lower socioeconomic status (SES). LARC use has been positively associated with subsequent intended fertility, but the frequency of this post-LARC outcome has not been compared among SES groups in national studies. Using health insurance type to proxy for SES, we combine data from two nationally representative surveys to compare Medicaid-insured and privately insured women's ages at LARC discontinuation, their risk of a post-LARC birth by age, and their reports of whether the post-LARC birth was at the "right time." We find that Medicaid-insured women discontinue LARC use at much younger ages than do privately insured women and have a much higher likelihood of giving birth soon after LARC discontinuation at these younger ages. Consequently, similar overall proportions of women in the two groups report post-LARC births occurring at the "right time." We conclude that the alignment of achieved and desired birth timing following LARC use is similar between these two SES groups.

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.

The undocumented immigrant population in the United States is aging and diversifying by origin group. However, research on aging among undocumented immigrants focuses on Mexicans and Central Americans, even as this population declines, and less is known about other groups. We analyze residual estimates of the undocumented population and the 2018‒2022 panels of the Survey of Income and Program Participation to document trends in age at arrival, duration in undocumented status, and socioeconomic and health correlates for undocumented immigrants across 27 countries or regions. We find dramatic increases in the older undocumented population across all origin groups, especially among those from Asia, the Caribbean, Europe, Canada, and Oceania. Aging in place drives population aging among the largest groups-those from Mexico, Central America, Venezuela, and India-while both aging in place and increases in arrivals at older ages are responsible for population aging among those from other origins. Additionally, undocumented status for older immigrants from most origins is associated with significant socioeconomic disadvantage regardless of age at arrival, but especially for those who age in place. This finding foreshadows rising inequality by legal status among America's seniors as the most disadvantaged immigrant groups age in place in coming decades.

This research note examines the U.S. policy landscape of longevity by documenting life expectancy trends between 1990 and 2019 among Black and White men and women across state policy contexts, grouped by policy liberalism trajectories over the last 60 years. I estimate age group and cause-of-death contributions to the growth of the liberal state life expectancy advantage, which culminated in 2018-2019 to between 2.5 and 3.8 years. Notably, by 2018-2019, Black life expectancy, particularly among women, in liberal policy environments had surpassed or equaled White life expectancy in certain conservative contexts. Although clear policy gradients emerge for White populations, Black life expectancy appears to be less patterned across policy environments, with advantage concentrated in the most liberal states. The growth of the liberal advantage was driven primarily by improvements at younger ages (<50) and in HIV/AIDs and homicides among Black, particularly male, populations; in late adulthood (50-74) and in cancers, circulatory diseases, and respiratory diseases among White populations; and at the oldest ages (75+) and in mental and nervous system disorders among women. Negative contributions of drug-related mortality, particularly among men, suggest that the drug epidemic undermined further growth of the liberal state advantage.