Category Research spotlight
Adding the Education Dimension: Projecting Europe’s Labour Force up to 2053 by Age, Sex and Educational Attainment
The anticipated impact of population ageing on shrinking the labour force in Europe is a growing matter of concern among policy makers. But might the impact of ageing be alleviated by expanding education? In this post, Elke Loichinger from the Vienna Institute of Demography (VID) and the Vienna University of Economics and Business (WU) addresses the […]
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 […]
Marriage Squeeze for Men or Women? Marriage and Socio-Demographic Change in India
The skewed sex ratio at birth in India, the result of sex-selective abortion, has led demographers to anticipate that there will be an excess of men in the future who will be unable to marry. Marriage markets, however, are not only structured by demographic factors such as age and sex, but also by factors […]
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 Land of Babushka
This is a post by Ilya Kashnitsky, which discusses his recent research on population dynamics in Russia. There are some Russian words that are commonly known across the world. One of them is “babushka”, meaning “granny”, which in some contexts can simply be translated as “old lady”. In fact, this word may become even more […]
Exploring the limits of household surveys in Africa
In this post, LSE’s Ernestina Coast and UCL’s Sara Randall outline the importance of accuracy of data taken in international surveys to ensure poverty-related data are high quality. Poverty statistics often depend on household-level measurements from survey data, making the definition of household of critical importance. Many policy-makers, government agencies and researchers see poverty as […]
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 […]
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 […]
How to Tackle the Socioeconomic Inequalities of Teenage Pregnancy
This is a post by Heini Väisänen based on her article “Social Inequalities in Teenage Fertility Outcomes: Childbearing and Abortion Trends of Three Birth Cohorts in Finland”. Heini Väisänen is a PhD candidate in demography at the London School of Economics and Political Science. In the media, Finland is often displayed as an example of […]
Changing patterns: Regional mortality differences and the East-West divide in Germany
Eva Kibele’s (E.U.B.Kibele@rug.nl) guest post is based on her PhD thesis “Regional mortality differences in Germany”, written while she was with the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research and supervised by James W. Vaupel, Gabriele Doblhammer and Vladimir Shkolnikov. Currently she is a postdoc researcher at the Population Research Center of the University of Groningen, […]
Demographic situation and determination of pension age – the case of Turkey
İlker Şirin and Fanny Janssen discuss in their article “Determination of Ideal Pension Age and Developments in Ageing: a case study for Turkey” different measures, old-age definitions, and decision criteria that result in different alternatives for the ideal pension age. İlker Şirin introduces the main aspects of the article in this research spotlight. Population ageing is often discussed […]
Research spotlight: Personal ties or institutional context? Determinants of partner choice for descendants of Turkish migrants in Europe
In their article “Partner choice patterns among the descendants of Turkish immigrants in Europe”, Doreen Huschek, Helga de Valk and Aart Liefbroer examine how the institutional context as well as personal ties, such as family and peers, influence the partner choice of second-generation Turks. Growing shares of European populations are made up of immigrants and […]
Research spotlight: When population composition effects reverse public opinion
Evgenia Bystrov shows in her recently published article “Religion, demography and attitudes toward civil marriage in Israel 1969–2009” how the changing population composition affects total agreement to introduce the institution of civil marriage. Although the civic right to get married is granted in most countries on this planet, in the developed world there is also […]
Research spotlight: When legalising abortion isn’t enough
LSE’s Ernestina Coast is the Principal Investigator on a new research project in Zambia that seeks to establish how investment in abortion services impacts the socio-economic conditions of women and their households. Zambia’s relatively liberal abortion laws make the country a rare case in sub-Saharan Africa, a region where abortion is generally prohibited altogether or […]
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