Target Fertility,Contraception, And Aggregate Rates: Toward A Formal Synthesis

This paper develops a stock adjustment model relating total expected births to conventional aggregate fertility rates for married women over 25. Each year, cohorts bear about 20 percent of their additional expected births. Aggregate U.S. rates have been consistent with expectations as expressed in surveys between 1955 and 1975; indeed, total expected births may be inferred from aggregate fertility behavior. A peculiar empirical finding is that the additional expected fertility of nonterminators has not changed since 1955, despite the dramatic decline in total expected and actual fertility. The model leads to a dynamic expression for the duration pattern of current and cumulative fertility and for the proportion of couples who have terminated childbearing. The model is also used to analyze the effects of changing contraceptive failure rates on fertility patterns. For example, a decline in “timing” failure rates increases duration-specific fertility five years later.     

Marriage Patterns And Cumulative Fertility In West Malaysia: 1966–1967

Differentials in age at first marriage and being married more than once are discussed for a probability sample of West Malaysian currently married women 15-44 years of age. Both marriage ages and the incidence of multiple marriages vary greatly by race, place of current residence, wife's education, and husband's occupation; and the marriage variables are shown to have significant effects on the cumulative fertility of West Malaysian women. Early marriage leads to higher cumulative fertility and multiple marriages lead to lower cumulative fertility. Since the social groups with the highest proportions of early marriages are also those with the highest incidence of multiple marriages, the marriage variables explain some but not all of the variance in cumulative fertility for West Malaysian social groups. After adjustment for the effects of the marriage variables, rural Indian or Pakistani women still have the highest cumulative fertility and urban Chinese women with more than five years of schooling still have the lowest cumulative fertility.     

A test and modification of zipf’s hypothesis for predicting interstate migration

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the accuracy of Zipf’s hypothesis in estimating interstate migration streams in the United States, and then to determine whether the predictive power of Zipf’s hypothesis can be improved by adding additional variables. The three independent variables in Zipf’s hypothesis accounted for 57 percent of the variation in interstate migration streams in 1935–1940, 61 percent in 1949–1950, and 68 percent in 1955–1960. The addition of per capita personal income of the states of origin and of destination increased the explained variance by only four percentage points in 1935–1940 and by less than one percentage point in 1949–1950 and 1955–1960. Then, the Petersen-Greenwood hypothesis that interstate migration streams in any period are a function of previous flows was tested by adding cumulative lifetime migration as an independent variable. Over 80 percent of the variation in interstate migration streams was explained by cumulative lifetime mobility, as reflected by state of birth data. The conclusion of the study is that the Petersen-Greenwood hypothesis provides a better estimate of interstate migration streams than does Zipf’s hypothesis. Nevertheless, the Petersen Greenwood hypothesis requires further evaluation to determine whether cumulative lifetime mobility is simply a proxy for some other underlying variable and whether it provides accurate estimates of migration streams for other geographic areas.     

Subjective Indicators Construction by Distance Indices: An Application to Life Satisfaction Data

The construction of subjective indicators for measuring phenomena expressed in an ordinal scale is a central issue in social sciences, particularly in sociology and psychology. In this paper, we propose the use of a subjective indicator by groups of units (for example, by geographical area) based on the ‘distance’ between the empirical cumulative distribution and a hypothetical cumulative distribution of reference. This approach allows to avoid the awkward question of the ‘quantification’ of an ordinal variable, i.e., the conversion of an ordinal variable into an interval variable. As an example of application, we consider life satisfaction data coming from the annual multipurpose survey on “Aspects of Daily Life”, carried out by the Italian National Institute of Statistics, and we present a comparison with some classical methods.     

Demographic aspects of fertility in Thailand

Abstract Data from a national rural and urban sample survey are analysed in order to examine various demographic aspects of fertility in Thailand. Marital fertility rates found for Thailand are among the highest in Asia. Particularly noteworthy is the persistence of high fertility at older ages of childbearing for rural women. Cumulative fertility shows a pronounced relationship with age at marriage and current marital status. Women who marry at an older age or who experience disruption of their marriages are clearly more likely to have fewer children ever born. Differences in both current and cumulative fertility are strongly associated with residence. Rural women who constitute the vast majority of Thai women, experience the highest fertility, Bangkok-Thonburi women experience the lowest fertility and provincial urban women are characterized by an intermediate fertility level which is closer, however, to the experience of their counterparts in the capital than in the countryside. Rural-urban fertility differences are mitigated but by no means eliminated by differences in infant mortality. In both rural and urban areas a positive association between cumulative fertility and infant morality is evident. Breast-feeding, commonly practised for extended periods-among both rural and urban Thai women, undoubtedly serves to some extent as an intervening variable in this relationship. A comparison of current fertility with cumulative fertility strongly suggests that a decline in marital fertility has been under way recently among urban women, especially those residing in the capital, but not at all among rural women. Although it seems safe to assume that the urban fertility decline results in large part from an increasing use of contraception among urban women, those still in the reproductive ages who were using or had previously used birth control were characterized by higher cumulative fertility than women who had never practised contraception. Evidently couples resort to family planning only late in the family building process after they have already achieved or exceeded the number of children they wish to have.     

Assessing Health Endowment,Access and Choice Determinants: Impact on Retired Europeans’ (In)activity and Quality of Life

A future for the E.U., dominated by an ever-increasing population of retired citizens represents a major challenge to social and health policy in European countries. Under Rowe and Kahn’s (Gerontol 37(4):433–440, 1997) perspective on positive aging, this paper is interested in exploring the role of health on citizens’ active participation after retirement and social engagement to life and quality of life. This paper also aims at finding whether Sen’s (Public health, ethics, and equity. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2004) capability approach or cumulative disadvantage or advantage theory relative to the access to health also verifies in a context of multi-national developed economies. The first part of this study is therefore concerned with generating a health indicator that enables this, whilst controlling for individual heterogeneity in self-rated health responses from 10,859 retired individuals from the SHARE survey. Socioeconomic determinants of health are found not to be critical in determining health in such a developed context whilst cumulative advantage is found relevant for the positive aging of Europeans. Evidence is found that active engagement in activities and quality of life are most certainly a prerogative for the more educated and the healthier retirees, hinting a strategy for European policymakers: cumulative advantage, leveraged by education and health policy, might just be the long-term strategy for contouring an aging and unproductive European population, transforming what could be a ‘burden’ into an asset.     

Sequential Neighborhood Effects: The Effect of Long-Term Exposure to Concentrated Disadvantage on Children’s Reading and Math Test Scores

Prior research has suggested that children living in a disadvantaged neighborhood have lower achievement test scores, but these studies typically have not estimated causal effects that account for neighborhood choice. Recent studies used propensity score methods to account for the endogeneity of neighborhood exposures, comparing disadvantaged and nondisadvantaged neighborhoods. We develop an alternative propensity function approach in which cumulative neighborhood effects are modeled as a continuous treatment variable. This approach offers several advantages. We use our approach to examine the cumulative effects of neighborhood disadvantage on reading and math test scores in Los Angeles. Our substantive results indicate that recency of exposure to disadvantaged neighborhoods may be more important than average exposure for children’s test scores. We conclude that studies of child development should consider both average cumulative neighborhood exposure and the timing of this exposure.     

Measuring The Effects Of Race Differentials In Mortality Upon Surviving Family Members

A model is developed to use marital history data from the U.S. Current Population Survey and mortality statistics from the federal registration system to estimate color differences in (a) the risk of widowhood among women in the working ages and (b) the cumulative duration of widowhood. Color differentials in mortality among married males are thereby translated into person-years of dependent survivorship among women, in anticipation of our later estimating average and cumulative lifetime income losses for the survivors. Initial results of this model, dealing with the demographic aspects of survivorship, are presented.     

The racial crossover in comorbidity, disability, and mortality

This study analyzed one respondent per household who was age 70 or more at the time of the household's inclusion in Wave 1 (1993-1994) and whose survival status was determinable at Wave 2 (1995-1996) of the Survey on Asset and Health Dynamics Among the Oldest Old (AHEAD Survey). At age 76 at Wave 1, there was a racial crossover in the cumulative number of six potentially fatal diagnoses (chronic lung disease, cancer, heart disease, hypertension, diabetes, and stroke) from a higher cumulative average number for blacks to a higher average number for whites. Also, there was a racial crossover at age 86 in the cumulative average number of disabilities in the Advanced Activities of Daily Living (AADLs), from a higher average for blacks to a higher average for whites. Between Waves 1 and 2, there was a racial crossover in the odds of mortality from higher odds for blacks to higher odds for whites; this occurred at about age 81. The results are consistent with the interpretation that the racial crossover in comorbidity (but not the crossover in AADL disability) propelled the racial crossover in mortality.     

Determinants Of Cumulative Fertility In Ghana

The relatively few studies conducted on fertility differentials in Ghana have not controlled for the effect of important demographic variables, such as age at first marriage and current age of respondent. This paper attempts a multivariate analysis of the relationship between cumulative fertility and age at first marriage, level of education, religion, form of marriage and residence of husband. Data drawn from a census sample survey in 1971 include 72,816 currently married females aged 15–49 years. Age at first marriage was inversely related to cumulative fertility. The differentials were more pronounced for older women. Among the older women, the differentials were larger for rural than urban women. There were also significant fertility differentials associated with level of education, religion and form of marriage. Husband’s residence was a poor predictor of cumulative fertility. As a policy measure, it is suggested that priority be given to providing young women with more education or employment opportunities as an alternative to early marriage.     

Fertility trends in Australia

Using published data from the Australian vital registration and census systems, several time series are compiled: crude birth rates from the 1860s; fertility rates from the 1880s; age-specific and parity-specific measures from the 191Os; cumulative fertility measures by birth year of parent beginning with the 1890s; and cumulative fertility measures for marriages by year contracted from the 1910s.The decline in fertility to the 1930s, the upswing to 1961, and declines thereafter revealed by annual fertility measures show far more variation than do measures of total generation fertility—2.7 children per woman born in 1893–95, 2.3 1906–10, 2.8 1921–25, and perhaps 3.0 for women born in the 1930s. Both annual and generation measures show a younger age at parenthood, a decrease in childlessness, and progressively fewer large families. In the light of present experience, it seems not unreasonable to project generation fertility of 2.5 children, implying a crude birth rate of about 20 per thousand for the next fifteen years or so.     

The limits to cumulative causation: International migration from Mexican Urban Areas

We present theoretical arguments and empirical research to suggest that the principal mechanisms of cumulative causation do not function in large urban settings. Using data from the Mexican Migration Project, we found evidence of cumulative causation in small cities, rural towns and villages, but not in large urban areas. With event-history models, we found little positive effect of community-level social capital and a strong deterrent effect of urban labor markets on the likelihood of first and later U.S. trips for residents of urban areas in Mexico, suggesting that the social process of migration from urban areas is distinct from that in the more widely studied rural migrant-sending communities of Mexico.     

应用队列累计生育率分析我国生育水平变动趋势——兼与郭志刚教授讨论

本文对反映生育水平的两个基本指标——总和生育率和队列累计生育率进行分析,肯定多年来多个调查所得到的队列累计生育率的数据质量。尽管队列累计生育率反映的是"过去"而不是"当前"的实际生育水平,但历次调查所反映出的1990年代以来生育水平变化趋势是持续下降,并推断近几年的总和生育率已经下降到1.6以下。     

Mapping vulnerability to climate change-related hazards: children at risk in a US–Mexico border metropolis

There are significant human impacts associated with climate change. This paper introduces a model for identifying small area risks associated with children’s vulnerability to climate change-related hazard exposures, which is transferable to other regions and adaptable to varied population and exposure scenarios. The cross-national El Paso-Ciudad Juárez (US-Mexico) metropolis serves as the study area for model implementation, which involves mapping social vulnerability, hazard exposure, and cumulative climate change-related risks. This study addresses two limitations of extant fine-scale climate change vulnerability mapping studies. First, rather than focusing on one exposure variable, it assesses the combined risks of multiple exposures (extreme heat, peak ozone, and floods) and, thus, offers a model for mapping neighborhood-level cumulative climate change exposure risks. Second, it provides a model for small area spatial analyses of climate change vulnerability within low-/middle-income countries and in contexts where climate change risks (and appropriate responses) are cross-national in scope.     

Quantifying Intrinsic and Extrinsic Contributions to Human Longevity: Application of a Two-Process Vitality Model to the Human Mortality Database

The rise in human life expectancy has involved declines in intrinsic and extrinsic mortality processes associated, respectively, with senescence and environmental challenges. To better understand the factors driving this rise, we apply a two-process vitality model to data from the Human Mortality Database. Model parameters yield intrinsic and extrinsic cumulative survival curves from which we derive intrinsic and extrinsic expected life spans (ELS). Intrinsic ELS, a measure of longevity acted on by intrinsic, physiological factors, changed slowly over two centuries and then entered a second phase of increasing longevity ostensibly brought on by improvements in old-age death reduction technologies and cumulative health behaviors throughout life. The model partitions the majority of the increase in life expectancy before 1950 to increasing extrinsic ELS driven by reductions in environmental, event-based health challenges in both childhood and adulthood. In the post-1950 era, the extrinsic ELS of females appears to be converging to the intrinsic ELS, whereas the extrinsic ELS of males is approximately 20 years lower than the intrinsic ELS.     

Estimating the emigration rates of legal immigrants using administrative and survey data: The 1971 cohort of immigrants to the United States

Based on administrative and survey data as well as data-based assumptions about the bounds on alien address reporting, this study provides estimates of the lower and upper bounds for the cumulative net emigration rates, by country and area of origin, of the FY1971 cohort of legal immigrants to the United States as of January 1979. The merged data indicate that the cumulative net emigration rate for the entire cohort could have been as high as 50 percent. Canadian emigration was probably between 51 and 55 percent. Emigration rates for legal immigrants from Central America, the Caribbean (excluding Cuba), and South America were at least as high as 50 percent, and could have been as high as 70 percent. Emigration rates for Koreans and Chinese could not have exceeded 22 percent over the same period.     

Relation of transition probabilities in the Leslie model to those from experimental cumulative distributions

Summary We explore the relationship between transition probabilities in the Leslie model and those derived from experimental cumulative distributions. The nature of the two kinds of probabilities are discussed, and a formula derived for converting from one to the other. A numerical example is given to illustrate the differences.     

Measuring subjective well-being: Unfolding the Bradburn Affect Balance Scale

Factor analysis of the items in the Bradburn Affect Balance Scale has repeatedly shown that the positive and negative affect items are unrelated. Despite this, negative affect scores are routinely subtracted from positive affect scores to derive Affect Balance Scale Scores that apparently provide a valid measure of a sense of well-being. In this paper we offer a resolution to this paradox — and so justify the use of Affect Balance Scale Scores — by showing that the positive and negative affect items each form a single cumulative scale, and that the two cumulative scales taken together form one unidimensional unfolding scale. This explanation is based on a hypothesis by Coombs and Kao (1960) — later proved mathematically by Ross and Cliff (1964) — that when data that are unfoldable in r dimensions are factor-analyzed, r+1 significant factors will be found. In an empirical test, Bradburn Affect Balance Scale data collected from ten countries in the 1981 and 1990 European Values Study surveys were analyzed. The results clearly support the hypothesis that the data form a single unidimensional unfolding scale, although two of the ten Affect Balance Scale items are not homogenous with the rest.     

Cumulative Structural Disadvantage and Racial Health Disparities: The Pathways of Childhood Socioeconomic Influence

Cumulative structural disadvantage theory posits two major sources of endogenous selection in shaping racial health disparities: a race-based version of the theory anticipates a racially distinct selection process, whereas a social class-based version anticipates a racially similar process. To operationalize cumulative structural disadvantage, this study uses data from the 1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth in a Latent Class Analysis that demographically profiles health impairment trajectories. This analysis is used to examine the nature of selection as it relates to racial differences in the development of health impairments that are significant enough to hinder one’s ability to work. The results provide no direct support for the race-based version of cumulative structural disadvantage theory. Instead, two key findings support the social class–based version of cumulative disadvantage theory. First, the functional form of the different health trajectories are invariant for whites and blacks, suggesting more racial similarly in the developmental process than anticipated by the race-based version of the theory. The extent of the racial disparity in the prevalences across the health impairment trajectories is, however, significant and noteworthy: nearly one-third of blacks (28 %) in the United States experience some form of impairment during their prime working years compared with 18.8 % of whites. Second, racial differences in childhood background mediate this racial health disparity through the indirect pathway of occupational attainment and through the direct pathway of early-life exposure to health-adverse environments. Thus, the selection of individuals into different health trajectories, based largely on childhood socioeconomic background, helps explain racial disparities in the development of health impairments.