Author Archives: demotrendsblog
Malaria importation from Africa to China driven by investment and migrant workers
Shangjie Lai writes about the role of migration in transmission routes of malaria between sub-Saharan Africa and China. The international spread of infectious diseases including Plasmodium falciparum malaria has been accelerated by increasing human mobility via air travel over recent decades. An emerging route of P. falciparum infection is from Africa to China by Chinese […]
Gendered pattern of publication in Demography?
Katharina Wolf writes about gendered authorship in demographic publication. Attaining gender equality is one of the major challenges of today’s societies. In most Western countries women have reached parity or even outperformed men in terms of higher educational attainment. This development has been accompanied by women’s greater involvement in academic research output, which is one […]
The geography of maternal health in the Sustainable Development Goal era – No woman left behind
Cori Ruktanochai presents maternal health outcomes at subnational level for five Sub Saharian African countries.
Elite athletes live longer and age slower – and we have a calculation for it
We know that exercise is good for us, but how does it really benefit our longevity and aging? Are our weekly gym sessions contributing to our longevity and the rate of aging? Our recent paper published in BMJ Open in collaboration with Polish researchers examined the rate of aging and mortality of Olympic athletes. The […]
Studying fertility in Israel with structural equation modeling
This post by Evgenia Bystrov highlights the controversy around the ultimate causes of high fertility in Israel: religiosity or nationalism. There is a long-running debate on the drivers of fertility among Jews in Israel. Two papers in particular stand out: Friedlander and Feldmann’s (1993) and Anson and Meir’s (1996). Surprisingly, the papers reach a different […]
Bridging the gender gap at home?
Brett Ory writes about childcare division within families based on the Generations and Gender Survey. International Women’s Day was last month and the take away message this year was much the same as in past years: Women have it better now than ever before, but it’s still not enough. While women in Western countries are […]
Childlessness in Spain: Tick Tock, Tick Tock, Tick Tock!
In this article, Albert Esteve, Daniel Devolder, and Andreu Domingo provide new insights about childlessness in Spain, drawn from his recent research published in Perspectives Demogràfiques.childlessness in the Spanish context offering a cohort perspective. You can find the complete article on Perspectives Demogràfiques from Centre d’Estudis Demogràfics.
Infrastructural Challenges in Maternity and Newborn Care in Rural Kenya
In this post Hildah Essendi (PhD) discusses her research on access to maternal and newborn care in two rural communities in Kenya. The efforts and commitments to accelerate progress towards the Millennium Development Goals for maternal and newborn health (MDGs 4 and 5) in low and middle income countries have focused primarily on providing key […]
Women, Church and Cohabitation in medieval Norway
Markéta Ivánková introduces the changing interrelationship between female roles, cohabitation and Church’s expectations to these roles based on fiction and official documents from medieval Norway. Samboerskap, or cohabitation, is often thought of as a peculiarly modern phenomenon, associated with female emancipation and the sexual revolution, but in Norway its roots are to be found in the […]
You May Still End Up Alone: Case Study of Older Adults in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Indonesia
Chia Liu explores the living arrangements of the older population of Cambodia, Vietnam and Indonesia, using the latest Integrated Public Use Microdata Series International (IPUMS-I). Globally, women are more likely to live alone in old age compared to men (United Nations, 2005). This is due to women marrying older men, which is then exacerbated by […]
The Art and Science of Being Uncertain
This post from Dr. Jakub Bijak from the University of Southampton discusses the challenges surrounding the management and communication of demographic uncertainty, and the methods available for approaching these problems. Some of the most captivating questions in contemporary demography are about what we do not know: the realms of uncertainty. This is especially visible in population forecasts, which […]
The Pride and Prejudice of Piketty
Prof. dr. Harry van Dalen on Thomas Piketty’s “Capital in the Twenty-First Century”. Anyone who has read his fair share of newspapers during the past year must have come across the name of Thomas Piketty and his plea to tackle the problem of income inequality. Numerous reviews and reactions have been raised. To name just […]
Maternal body composition and breast milk transfer in the context of the nutrition transition
Femke Hitzert won the NIDI Master Thesis Award in 2014 for her research on the association between maternal body composition and breast milk transfer. This guest post by Femke describes her findings. Breast milk is the most important source of nutrients for infants during the first six months of their life, which is underlined by […]
Fertility from a Bayesian perspective – worth trying?
This guest post by Beata Osiewalska discusses and describes her research on Bayesian approaches in fertility analysis. Is it possible to see the probability distribution over the number of children for a person with some particular demographic or socio-economic background? Have you ever wondered what this distribution would look like in your case? In this […]
Examining the Urban and the Rural
This is a post by Ashira Menashe-Oren on varying age structures between rural and urban areas in Sub-Saharan Africa and their consequences. The rural-urban dichotomy is the one of the most common classifications used to describe population distribution within a country. Available for many data sources, it is a simple binary measure. It is universally […]
The challenges in researching the demographic consequences of conflict: Reflections on the Sierra Leonean civil war, 1991-2002
This post is by Amie Kamanda, and discusses the importance of and challenges in investigating the demographic consequences of conflict. In particular, some of the problems in obtaining reliable data in times of conflict are discussed with reference to Amie’s work on the Civil War in Sierra Leone. Importance of researching the demographic consequences of conflict […]
Location, location, location! Why space matters in demography and why we should care.
Alessandra Carioli (Netherlands Interdisciplinary Demographic Institute) prepared this overview based on her study presented at EPC 2014 in Budapest “A Spatial Analysis of Recent Fertility Patterns in Spain”. This study won one of the poster awards at EPC 2014 and is co-authored together with Daniel Devolder (Centre d’Estudis Demographics, UAB) and Joaquin Recaño (Centre d’Estudis […]
Probabilistic Population Projections: taking migration into account
Jonathan Azose is a PhD student at the University of Washington, United States. His research group focuses on probabilistic population projections, which looks to be an upcoming area in demography. In July 2014, the UN published probabilistic population projections for the first time. Probabilistic projections are nice in that they provide not only point projections, […]
Afghanistan: happy with high maternal mortality?
About the author of this post: Bart de Bruijn (PhD) is a demographer and development sociologist. As a consultant in population and development he provides technical assistance in the field of household surveys and population censuses to UN agencies and governments in developing countries and countries in transition. Since 2009 he is involved as Chief […]
Endogeneity vs causality in family research: is it always the chicken-and-egg problem?
This is a post by Evgenia Bystrov based on her article Testing the Second Demographic Transition Theory with Seemingly Unrelated Regression: Marital Postponement and Human Empowerment recently published in the European Sociological Review. The article focuses on the relations between values and marriage behaviour. The writing of this article was triggered by numerous academic debates […]
demotrends 