Category Methods
On the Use of Engineering Notation in Demography: A Technical Note
Thomas K. Burch from the University of Victoria, Canada compares scientific and engineering notation in demography, and presents the benefits of using engineering notation as part of a demographer’s toolkit.
Multi-morbidity in the studies of mortality: how to use important information that is usually discarded
Agnieszka Fihel writes about the quality of multi-morbidity data and its importance in mortality research, based on her study of Poland.
The Rostock Retreat on Visualisation
Retreating from conferences Picture it. You’ve been working on your presentation for a big conference for months. Last night, insomnia took hold and you were running through your slides in a sweat. You’re there, ready to present, and you look around the room and you see a sparse sea of faces, most of whom look […]
Demography and life choices
Frans Willekens discusses multi-staged decision processes over the human life course. His post is based on the Population Studies special issue dedicated to the subject published in October 2017. 1.The importance of individual agency for demography Population change is determined by the life choices individuals and families make. To understand population change, we need to understand […]
A functional data analysis approach for forecasting age-specific population size: A case study for the United Kingdom
Han Lin Shang writes about forecasting age-specific population size based on an example of the UK. In recent decades, we have seen a considerable amount of development in the stochastic modelling and forecasting of population. Cohort component projection models are often used to model the evolution of age-specific population, and are particularly useful to highlight which […]
Demography and Family: A Microsimulation Strategy to Bridge the Gap
The study of the family has had a long and distinguished history in the demographic research tradition.[1] A central preoccupation of this early work was the development of methods to obtain information about family structures from basic demographic characteristics of populations. As a result of this work, we learned to adapt classic life table methods […]
Working with spatial data to generate a consistent demographic time series
In this post, Ilya Kashnitsky shows how we can use freely available data and statistical software to create a consistent demographic time series. NUTS stands for the Nomenclature of Territorial Units For Statistics. The history of NUTS dates back to the beginning of 1970s, when European countries developed unified standards for systems of administrative geography. It was […]
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 […]
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 […]
Inferring population-level effects from individual-level effect estimates: G-computation
The fields of epidemiology and demography are closely aligned. Even demographers interested in fertility or migration, not just mortality, can learn a great deal from epidemiology. As a recent study has argued, epidemiology is currently undergoing a methodological revolution, and this is likely to affect demography as well. The epidemiological revolution is, in fact, a […]
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 […]
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 […]
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, […]
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 […]
Forecasting the outcome of the World Cup
The World Cup begins this week, in the face of controversy over corruption and venality in FIFA and continuing protests in the host nation Brazil against the incredible cost of the tournament and the harsh crackdowns on favela residents. Apart from the obvious moral and political debates, there are interesting demographic angles that could be taken […]
Causal inference
Does working as a researcher cause your eyesight to become strained, your back to become hunched, and your social life to become rather limited? Or is this just an association? The fact that I’m even asking this question probably suggests that I need to get out more. But the question of causality arises frequently in […]
A hot topic and a futile quest? The recent discussion on age-period-cohort analysis
Last year, Yang & Land released their book on age-period-cohort (APC) analysis. A large section of the December issue of Demography is dedicated to age-period-cohort analysis. And just a week or two ago a paper by Bell & Jones on the Yang & Land APC model was published in Demographic Research. APC analysis appears to […]
demotrends 