Demography最新文献

The last century witnessed an unprecedented rise in life expectancy; however, in recent decades the "unthinkable" has occurred-life expectancy stagnation, a dramatic drop in the U.S. international life expectancy ranking, rising midlife death rates, and widening socioeconomic and geographic disparities. The "inconceivable" has occurred with the high level of mortality from the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States, which further exacerbated racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic disparities and highlighted the vulnerabilities of long-term care systems and fragmented health policies. The "unknowable" future of mortality is explored through the lens of emerging work in geroscience based on an integration of biology with studies of aging populations, which offers some promise of potential interventions in the process of aging that underlies chronic disease resulting in mortality at older ages. However, transformative changes in social policy, health equity, behaviors, and legal rights are needed for the United States to improve its current situation. While the integration of biological understanding is likely to point to new avenues for improving population health and life expectancy, without immediate social changes, only a portion of the U.S. population is likely to be able to take advantage of these improvements, and the United States is likely to lag other countries in the level of life expectancy.

Scholars continue to debate the progress of the gender revolution. Some argue that the gender revolution is stalled, whereas others see an emerging second half marked by men's increased involvement in the home. Using longitudinally linked monthly data from the 1989-2020 Current Population Survey, I show that U.S. fathers from more recent cohorts worked fewer hours around the time of a childbirth than earlier cohorts-evidence consistent with the second half of the gender revolution. The magnitude of change is modest but is larger among college-educated men, men with a college-educated partner, and men in dual-earner households. Changes across cohorts are entirely accounted for by men's increasing reports of parental leave usage. Findings shed light on the changing relationship between parenthood and work for men and suggest continued steps toward gender equality.

The relationship between retirement and health is a critical issue in rapidly aging societies. Numerous studies have investigated the effect of retirement on subsequent health, but this research has paid little attention to heterogeneous patterns of retirement. To address this limitation, we examine the relationship between retirement pathways from full-time regular employment and health. Using the 2005-2019 Longitudinal Survey of Middle-aged and Elderly Persons conducted in Japan, the world's oldest country, we first use sequence analysis to identify distinct retirement trajectories at ages 59-66. We then evaluate alternative approaches to estimate relationships between these retirement trajectories and an index measure of self-rated health. Results of ordinary least-squares and inverse probability-weighted regression adjustment models show that both gradual and abrupt retirement are associated with worse health relative to continued regular employment. In contrast, estimates from instrumental variable models are imprecise and provide no clear evidence of a relationship between retirement trajectories and health. Results are generally robust to sensitivity checks. These findings help establish an empirical foundation for understanding the potential implications of heterogeneous retirement pathways for health at older ages in the context of mandatory retirement policies and rapid population aging.

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.

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.