Demography最新文献

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This article establishes a new fact about immigration policies: granting legal status to undocumented immigrants has long-term effects on their formal employment and assimilation. We exploit the broad amnesty enacted in Italy in 2002, together with rich survey data collected in 2011 on a representative sample of immigrant households, to estimate the long-run effects of receiving legal amnesty. Immigrants who were not eligible for the amnesty have a 14% lower probability of working in the formal sector a decade later, are subject to more severe ethnic segregation on the job, and display less linguistic assimilation than those who obtained legal status through the amnesty.

Hypotheses explaining fertility levels in unions of women and men with different racial and ethnic origins (exogamous union fertility)-including stigma, in-between, pronatal, and assimilative fertility-apply equally when the minority group partner is the woman or the man. As an alternative, we propose a gendered theorizing of exogamous union fertility in which the fertility preferences of either the woman's or the man's racial and ethnic group might dominate. Our analyses reveal strong support for male-predominant patterns: the couple's fertility is nearer to that in an endogamous union of the man's racial and ethnic group than to that of an endogamous union of the woman's racial and ethnic group. We conjecture that women selecting into exogamous unions to realize their own individual fertility preferences might partially explain this finding. We find no cases of female predominance, in which the couple's fertility is nearer to that in an endogamous union of the woman's racial and ethnic group than that of an endogamous union of the man's racial and ethnic group. In addition, using a simple fertility model in which both the woman's and the man's racial and ethnic groups are included as predictors, we find that only the man's coefficients are statistically and substantively significant. A critical implication of our findings is that the standard demographic practice of using the woman's racial and ethnic group will increasingly downwardly bias estimates of fertility differences by race and ethnicity in the United States as exogamy becomes increasingly common.

Work is an important contributor to racial and ethnic disparities in health across the life course. Because functional limitations at older ages are associated with accumulated physical wear and tear throughout life, investigating work-related mechanisms that differentially expose Black and Hispanic Americans to difficult material circumstances over time is an important step toward understanding these disparities. Using a new data source of lifetime work histories from the Health and Retirement Study, this study investigates the role of accumulated years of physically demanding work (PDW) through middle adulthood on the number of functional limitations at age 60 (FL60). This study also assesses whether cumulative PDW accounts for the observed differences in FL60 among U.S.-born Black, Hispanic, and White respondents. We find that cumulative PDW is strongly associated with FL60 and partially accounts for the racial and ethnic gap in FL60 in the presence of extensive control variables. We also demonstrate that a traditional regression model underestimates the Black-White and Black-Hispanic differences in FL60 compared with a marginal structural model with an inverse probability of treatment weighting approach. Our results illustrate the importance of studying work from a life course perspective that ultimately influences the health of the diverse, aging U.S. population.