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.
Dan Chen and Yuying Tong write about their research on the association between children’s delayed marriage and parental psychological distress in China.
Despite Iceland’s reputation as one of the most gender equal countries, Sunna Símonardóttir’s research suggests that parenthood is still very much equated with motherhood in the country.
Aušra Maslauskaitė and Anja Steinbach write about their research in which they analysed parenting and childcare division among Lithuanian and Belarussian families.
Family demographers have long been interested in the debate surrounding changes in the marriage institution, associated with concepts such as the deinstitutionalization of marriage and the Second Demographic Transition. These perspectives focus on alternatives to traditional heterosexual marriage (what can be termed the external context of marriage), such as lifetime singlehood, same-sex marriage, and non-marital […]
Lara Bister writes about her master thesis on maternity leave lengths and maternal health in the long-run in Germany.
Agnieszka Fihel writes about the quality of multi-morbidity data and its importance in mortality research, based on her study of Poland.
With levels of political violence spiking dramatically in the last decades, addressing the consequences of armed conflict for population dynamics is of paramount importance. In this post, Orsola Torrisi presents findings from research on family formation in Azerbaijan, a country embroiled in a violent, yet mostly forgotten conflict with Armenia since the early 1990s.
Population age composition is recognized as determining numerous aspects of society – from fertility rates to pension policies. One type of population age structure, a youth bulge, has its own particular effects. A youth bulge generally refers to a population with a high proportion of 15-24 year olds. A positive effect of a youth bulge […]
Giorgi Kankia and Lika Zhvania write about population change in the country of Georgia from a spatial development perspective. Shrinking population The population of Georgia is shrinking. According to official statistics, it decreased by 1.2 mln (nearly 25% of the total population in 1990) in 1994 – 2018. Somewhat decreased fertility rates or armed conflicts […]
This blog post is written by Sarmitė Mikulionienė and Gražina Rapolienė about the outcomes of ageing in Lithuania.
Lea Taragin-Zeller discusses the lived experience of contraceptive choice and childbearing. Today, we have come used to thinking of every child as either “planned” or “unplanned”. Children are either a calculated choice of rational parents or a “mistake” made by irresponsible parents. But, while I was conducting research among Israel’s Orthodox Jews, I realised that […]
Jon Minton introduces the Shiny app he developed for exploring mortality based on the Human Mortality Database.
Katrin Schwanitz writes about cross-national variation in transition to adulthood.
Over 50 million Hispanics live in the United States. One-quarter speak English and no other language, and another 40% speak English very well. The other 18 million Hispanics are split between those who speak English well (38%), not well (37%), and not at all (26%). Remarkably, we know little about where Hispanics with divergent English […]
Xiana Bueno and Mary Brinton write about the gap between fertility ideals and intentions in Sweden, Japan, United States and Spain.
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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