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, […]
Malaria is one of the toughest and deadliest diseases of all time. This potentially deadly, but preventable mosquito-borne parasitic disease caused an estimated 627,000 deaths worldwide in 2012, with approximately 77% occurring in children under the age of five. However, the actual number of deaths due to malaria may be even higher; an interesting study […]
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 […]
Open access has been a hot topic in academic communities recently. In the UK, recent changes in policy by the government and Research Councils have led to concerns that the revenues of publishing companies are being protected at the expense of the publicly-funded science budget. Elsewhere, the quality of some open access journals has been put […]
This is a guest post by Ann Larson. Ann Larson is a demographer specializing in evaluating regional development and global health programs. She blogs from her home in rural Western Australia. In a recent tweet Demotrends shared a media report that France’s fertility was dipping below 2 children per woman. Doom was predicted to inevitably follow—French women’s […]
This overview has been prepared together with Anna Rybińska, one of the organising committee members of the conference “Comparing families: does international perspective help?”. How to compare families across countries? What such comparisons add to country-specific studies? Has using cross-country comparisons brought us closer to understanding family-related behaviours? Aiming to answer these questions, members of […]
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 […]
There is evidence that people fundamentally differ in their understanding of data. Three (implicit) philosophies speak of data as objective facts (measurements), as subjective observations (records), and as communications (signs). An example explains what this means in practice. The case study below is adapted from Brian Ballsun-Stanton’s PhD thesis Asking about data. He is an […]
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 […]
It seems unlikely, unless you have a very narrow set of research interests, that you’ll be able to attend every “relevant” conference. For one thing, most research budgets won’t stretch that far, (even if you can handle sleeping in a youth hostel dormitory with twenty drunken gap year students). For another, conferences certainly take up […]
Most researchers are familiar with the difference between bias and precision. However, not everyone knows that we can allow for a little bit of bias in order to get big gains in precision, and when it can be beneficial to do so. In this post I detail the why and how. A refresher on bias […]
Agent-Based Simulation (ABS) is not yet a common-place term in demographic circles: a quick search of some of the major demographic journals yields not more than a handful of articles that use this or similar terms, and fewer still that have tackled research questions from this perspective. Despite this, it is a methodology which has […]
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 […]
This is a guest post by Edward Morgan (BSc FRGS). Edward is a master’s student studying Population and Development at the London School of Economics. Edward is a Geography graduate of the University of St Andrews and a former public health consultant to the Met Office. For more information, visit his webpage. Earlier this week, […]
There has been a rise in the number of demography-related blogs during recent years. In addition to individual researchers’ blogs, such as Weeks Population, by Hein de Haas or by Pablo Mateos, there are several nice collaborations: Demography Matters – is probably one of the first demography blogs that was started. They have a nice […]
We thought it would be nice to have an overview of some of the main demographic news and publications, especially for those of you who don’t follow our Twitter or Facebook feed regularly. Below you can find a list with some of these news that different media channels or scientific journals published since the beginning of June, […]
Recent years have seen an increased use of qualitative methods in demographic research, which corresponds to demographers having broadened their scope and this includes methods not traditionally associated with population studies. There is still a substantial debate over uses of quantitative and qualitative methods in demography, so here I would like to touch on some […]
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 […]
The Lexis diagram belongs in the demographer’s toolbox like a mechanic’s wrench. It is the essential tool for visualizing lifelines and events as they occur along the intersection of age, (time) period and (birth) cohort. This means it is of great use to scientists doing longitudinal, time-to-event and even time series analyses. As such, it […]
While the flows of Nordic-Baltic migration might be small compared to the rest of the movements within Europe, they have an important role to play in the development of the region and relationships between countries. New trends and implications for the region were discussed at a recent conference in Tallinn called “Migration and Demographic Challenges […]
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