Demography最新文献

Educational inequality in health has been increasing in the United States. The growth in health inequality has not been limited to specific conditions but has been observed across a wide range of outcomes, including disability, multimorbidity, self-rated health, and mortality. This study used data for adults aged 50-79 from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey to assess changes in biological aging across education groups over a 25-year period. We found that while biological aging slowed for each education group, educational inequality increased owing to greater improvements among those with the highest education levels. Specifically, biological age differences between adults with 0-11 years of schooling and adults with 16+ years of schooling grew from one year in 1988-1994 to almost two years in 2015-2018. Growing inequality in biological aging was not attenuated by changes in smoking, obesity, or medication use. Overall, these results point to an increasing difference in physiological dysregulation by education among U.S. older adults, which might remain a source of greater and growing inequality in morbidity, disability, and mortality in the near future.

Over the past few decades, the United States has witnessed a gender revolution and transformation in family economic arrangements. However, little research has investigated the intergenerational transmission of earnings arrangements within different-sex couples, even though such knowledge illuminates the mechanisms underlying changes and continuities in the economic organization and gender relations within U.S. families. We use a life course perspective to examine whether and how different-sex couples' earnings arrangements two years after the birth of their first child are shaped by their parents' earnings arrangements across four periods (same life stage, contemporaneous, sensitive period, and cumulative). Two-generational panel data on different-sex couples and their parents are drawn from the nationally representative Panel Study of Income Dynamics (1968-2021). Regression models indicate that women tend to contribute more earnings if their male partner's mother contributed a larger share to the family income either during the same life stage (two years after her first birth) or over the life course of the male partner. No similar patterns emerge for the earnings arrangements of the female partner's parents. This two-generational life course study underscores the importance of couples' social origins and reveals the social (re)production of family economic arrangements and its gendered nature.

Understanding the circumstances in which children migrate is important to ensure their well-being. Yet, child migration in sub-Saharan Africa is not easy to measure. Health and Demographic Surveillance Systems (HDSS) provide an excellent opportunity to estimate child migration in the region. I examine out-migration patterns of children younger than 15 in eastern and southern Africa, where adult mortality is high, fostering is prevalent, and households are dynamic. Using longitudinal data pooled from 15 HDSS, covering roughly 451,000 children, I find that most children who migrate do so with their mothers (tied migration). Moreover, an intergenerational link between a mother's and her child's mobility is evident: children whose mothers are migrants are more likely to migrate themselves. Despite some expectations of agency in child mobility in later childhood (for education or work), children who out-migrate independently of their mothers are often orphaned or have mothers living elsewhere. Maternal death is a forceful driver of child migration, especially within six months following a mother's death. Thus, orphaned migrants are exposed to the double shock of losing a parent and a change in their immediate environment. However, children in larger households tend to migrate less, somewhat dampening the mobility of orphans.

Demographic estimates of sexually diverse coresidential relationships in the United States have traditionally concentrated on the sex composition of couples or the sexual identity of one partner alongside their relationship status. Using population-based dyadic data from the National Couples' Health and Time Study, which encompasses U.S. coresidential partnered adults aged 20‒60, we provide national estimates of couples' sexual identity composition. Our findings in this research note indicate that, according to dyadic reports of sexual identity, 10.94% (confidence interval [CI]: 8.58, 13.85) of couples included a partner who identifies as sexually diverse, more than double the estimate derived from the reported sexual identity of one partner (4.31%, CI: 3.18, 5.80). Specifically, 2.44% (CI: 1.86, 3.20) of couples had both partners reporting a sexually diverse identity, while 8.50% (CI: 6.34, 11.30) had only one partner doing so. Bisexual-identifying individuals and those with another/multiple sexual identities frequently have partners who identify as heterosexual. In contrast, gay/lesbian and heterosexual-identifying adults often have partners with the same sexual identity. Our sociodemographic portrait also revealed notable variations in the sociodemographic characteristics of couples based on their sexual identity composition. We argue that capturing couples' sexual identity composition further elucidates the demography of contemporary U.S. families.

Previous research has shown that internal mobility declined and outflows from large cities increased during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic in many Global North countries. However, the longer term impacts of the pandemic on mobility levels and patterns across the rural-urban hierarchy and in Global South contexts remain poorly understood because of limited high-resolution data. Drawing on location data of Facebook users, we examine changes in long-distance movements (>100 kilometers) across population density categories in Mexico from April 2020 to May 2022. We find a 40% decline in long-distance movements during April-December 2020 relative to a prepandemic baseline, with the largest reductions-more than 50%-in flows to and from large cities. In contrast to Global North patterns, we observe no increase in outflows from large cities. Movement patterns gradually returned to baseline during 2021-2022, but recovery was slower in the most densely populated areas. Our findings provide the first medium-term evidence of how the pandemic affected internal mobility across the rural-urban hierarchy in a major Global South country. They highlight the distinct dynamics of mobility disruptions in highly urbanized and socioeconomically unequal contexts and demonstrate the value of digital trace data for studying population movements where conventional statistics are unavailable.

Dementia prevalence exceeds 40% for individuals in advanced old age, but that figure is not informative about the lifetime risk of ever having dementia or the risk of having dementia for different durations. This study presents U.S. nationally representative estimates of the probability of having dementia for at least six months or one, two, or five years before death and variation in this probability by sex, race and ethnicity, health, and socioeconomic status. We used a joint longitudinal latent variable model of cognitive status, dementia, and survival to derive estimates based on data from the Health and Retirement Study. We found a higher lifetime risk of dementia than found in earlier U.S. studies: 41.3% (CI: 39.3% to 43.2%) of those who died after age 70 had dementia assessed at six months before death. Further, 38.7% (CI: 36.8% to 40.5%), 33.6% (CI: 31.8% to 35.4%), and 20.1% (CI: 18.6% to 21.5%) had dementia one, two, and five years before death, respectively. The risk was higher for women, individuals with less education, non-Hispanic Black individuals, and those with lower lifetime earnings. Having had a stroke significantly increased the risk of dementia. Even though longevity is the strongest known risk factor, longer lived subpopulations have a lower lifetime risk of dementia as a result of their lower age-specific prevalence.

This article uses large-scale Global Positioning System daily movement data collected from mobile devices in U.S. metropolitan areas to develop a novel measure to quantify racial, ethnic, and income segregation experienced in activity space, which captures both local residential environments and the connected communities that individuals frequently travel to. We modify conventional spatial segregation measures in three ways. First, we switch from a distance-based to a mobility-based conceptualization of group exposure. Second, we introduce daily mobility data traced via mobile devices to empirically measure mobility connectedness between communities. Third, we decompose our segregation measures into within- and between-community components to uncover different sources of segregation. Combining daily mobility data with measures of community characteristics obtained from the U.S. Census, we show that mobility-based measures capture dimensions of segregation that are quite distinct from distance-based measures. Our mobility-based measures consistently indicate both strong own-group isolation in terms of individuals' activity space manifested through their everyday movements and substantial heterogeneity in local mobility exposure even within communities of similar racial, ethnic, and income composition, particularly among minority communities. Our findings illustrate the value of combining mobility-based segregation measures with large-scale, geocoded human movement data to study racial, ethnic, and income segregation.

Widowhood is associated with elevated mortality risk in many social contexts. This research note is the first study to quantify and contextualize the mortality risk of widowhood for men (widowers) and women (widows) in India. We do so by using data from the first wave of the India Human Development Survey (2004-2005) on individuals whose survival status was observed seven years later in the second wave of the survey. We find no differences in mortality by widowhood status for adults aged 60 or older. However, we find higher mortality risks for widows and widowers aged 25-59 than for individuals who are married. Despite the unique vulnerabilities experienced by Indian widows, we find similar levels of elevated mortality for widows and widowers relative to married individuals aged 25-59. In this age group, we also document higher mortality for widows exposed to conservative and less egalitarian gender norms. These findings suggest that despite India's similarity to other contexts with elevated mortality for both widows and widowers, unequal gender norms still shape life chances for Indian widows.

In this research note, we examine how family size preferences evolved for women with and without children in response to changing COVID-19 mortality exposure during the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic. We leverage spatiotemporal variation in COVID-19 deaths occurring during panel surveys in 2020 and 2021 with a population-based sample of 2,520 women, aged 18-34, across 94 municipalities in Pernambuco, Brazil. We use individual fixed-effects regressions to examine whether changes in municipality-level COVID-19 death rates are associated with changes in women's desired family size, net of their own or their family's COVID-19 infection status and other time-varying sociodemographic factors. We find that women with and without children at baseline responded differently to changing municipality-level COVID-19 deaths: while women without children did not change their desired family size, women with children saw a small but significant increase in their desired family size in response to rising COVID-19 mortality. These innovative findings suggest that women with children responded to widespread COVID-19-related loss within their communities by wanting to build and consolidate their families. We advance knowledge about varying contextual influences on fertility preferences during epidemics in a middle-income country with early and below-replacement fertility.

Sub-Saharan Africa's fertility decline has lagged behind that of other regions. Using large-scale, individual-level data, I provide new evidence on how fertility in sub-Saharan Africa compares with that in East Asia, South Asia, and Latin America by examining differences in fertility outcomes by grade level across regions. Unlike prior research that compared aggregate fertility and education outcomes, I estimate fertility outcomes separately for each combination of region, area of residence, age group, and grade level. I find that differences in fertility between sub-Saharan Africa and other regions increase with education up to the end of primary school and then rapidly decrease. There is little consistent evidence of differences among women with secondary education or higher. Moreover, for grade levels where fertility is significantly higher in sub-Saharan Africa than in other regions, the differences are substantially smaller for surviving children than for children ever born. Using women's literacy as a proxy for school quality, I show that the results for literacy rates follow a similar pattern to the fertility outcomes. Overall, the results suggest that higher offspring mortality and lower quality of primary schooling contribute to higher fertility in sub-Saharan Africa compared with other regions.