Demography最新文献

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.

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.

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.

Prior studies show that Hispanic and Black immigrants are more susceptible to disabilities and chronic diseases in their later years than U.S.-born Whites, despite their health advantage at younger ages. Such studies often rely on data from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS), which disproportionately includes immigrants who arrived decades ago. The shortage of research on immigrants of other ethnoracial groups further makes it unclear whether the old-age declines in health advantages among Hispanic and Black immigrants are generalizable. Using the up-to-date HRS and National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) data, this study compares the prevalences of chronic diseases, functional limitations, and activity limitations between U.S.-born Whites and immigrants of various ethnoracial identities across datasets. We find that Hispanic and Black immigrants in the HRS exhibit significantly greater disability disadvantages at older ages in relation to native-born Whites than those in the NHIS. Older White and Asian immigrants encounter no health disadvantages regardless of data source. We demonstrate that the especially low socioeconomic status of Hispanic immigrants in the HRS, along with the two surveys' different measurements of activity limitations, partly contributes to the discrepancies between the surveys. We suggest that the HRS design is conducive to undersampling of immigrants arriving more recently, leading to its immigrants' unique socioeconomic profiles. This study underscores the need for scholars of immigration and health to be cautious about dataset-specific nuances.

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.

Theories linking fertility decline to rising education levels among women and children have featured prominently in discussions of African fertility change. Using survey data from 33 countries, this article leverages cross-place and cross-cohort variation to assess these theories' relevance to the continent's transitions in both realized and desired fertility. Across countries and subnational regions, lower fertility is associated with greater education for both mothers and children. Across cohorts within a country or region, fertility decline remains associated with the educational progress of women but has at most a weak relationship with the educational progress of children. These findings corroborate existing evidence that women's education drives fertility change but indicate a more limited role for the interplay of the number of children and their education. Reductions in ideal family size more consistently predict children's educational progress, suggesting that this interplay may become more relevant to African fertility change as ideals shift and their implementation improves.

This study revisits the polygyny‒fertility relationship in sub-Saharan Africa amid significant sociodemographic transformations, including declines in both fertility rates and the prevalence of polygyny. Using data from multiple rounds of the Demographic and Health Surveys across 23 African countries, we examine the contribution of polygyny to reductions in the total fertility rate (TFR), explore how the polygyny‒fertility relationship has evolved over time, and assess changes in the total number of children ever born, number of recent births, ideal fertility, and the desire for another child by polygyny status. Our findings show that the decline in polygyny has substantially contributed to reductions in TFR. While realized fertility-measured by children ever born and recent births-has declined for all married women, reductions have been greater among women in monogamous unions. Fertility preferences, including ideal fertility and the desire for another child, have decreased only among women in monogamous unions, while remaining stable for those in polygynous unions. Additionally, except for children ever born, we find minimal variation in fertility outcomes by wife's rank within polygynous unions. Taken together, these results underscore the complex influence of marriage systems on fertility and highlight the distinct fertility patterns of women in monogamous versus polygynous unions.