Statistical materials: the family in the USSR

Statistical data are presented on the family in the USSR. Data from the 1979 census are included on number of families and their distribution by size; distribution of families by size and type, social class, and nationality; number of families including members of different nationalities, 1959-1979; number of marriages and divorces, 1960-1981; changes in age at marriage, 1960-1981; and distribution of births by age of mother, 1969-1970, 1974-1975, and 1980-1981.     

Statistical materials: Part 2. The distribution of families by number of children up to age 16 by Union Republic

Data are presented showing family size for blue-collar workers, white-collar workers, and families on collective farms in the USSR and its Union Republics in 1981.     

Statistical materials. Results of the 1985 socio-demographic sample survey of the population

Results from the five percent socio-demographic sample survey of the USSR conducted in 1985 are presented. Data are provided on the educational status of the population and the labor force by nationality, republic, sex, and rural or urban area; income; marital status; marriage duration; divorce and separation; intervals between marriages; family size; family characteristics; families with children under 18; internal migration; and distribution of women by number of children ever born, republic, nationality, educational status, and expected family size     

Households and families

Changes in families and households in Poland since the 1978 census are examined using data from the 1985 micro-census. Consideration is given to changes in family size. The data are presented separately for rural and urban areas.     

All-Union population census 1989

Selected results from the 1989 Soviet census are presented. They concern population size, sex ratio, and age distribution of the rural and urban population for the whole country and constituent republics; and number of families and family size by rural and urban areas for the whole country and constituent republics.     

Analysis of familial aggregation in the presence of varying family sizes

Summary.  Family studies are frequently undertaken as the first step in the search for genetic and/or environmental determinants of disease. Significant familial aggregation of disease is suggestive of a genetic aetiology for the disease and may lead to more focused genetic analysis. Of course, it may also be due to shared environmental factors. Many methods have been proposed in the literature for the analysis of family studies. One model that is appealing for the simplicity of its computation and the conditional interpretation of its parameters is the quadratic exponential model. However, a limiting factor in its application is that it is not reproducible , meaning that all families must be of the same size. To increase the applicability of this model, we propose a hybrid approach in which analysis is based on the assumption of the quadratic exponential model for a selected family size and combines a missing data approach for smaller families with a marginalization approach for larger families. We apply our approach to a family study of colorectal cancer that was sponsored by the Cancer Genetics Network of the National Institutes of Health. We investigate the properties of our approach in simulation studies. Our approach applies more generally to clustered binary data.     

Analysis of the human sex ratio by using overdispersion models

For study of the human sex ratio, one of the most important data sets was collected in Saxony in the 19th century by Geissler. The data contain the sizes of families, with the sex of all children, at the time of registration of the birth of a child. These data are reanalysed to determine how the probability for each sex changes with family size. Three models for overdispersion are fitted: the beta–binomial model of Skellam, the 'multiplicative' binomial model of Altham and the double-binomial model of Efron. For each distribution, both the probability and the dispersion parameters are allowed to vary simultaneously with family size according to two separate regression equations. A finite mixture model is also fitted. The models are fitted using non-linear Poisson regression. They are compared using direct likelihood methods based on the Akaike information criterion. The multiplicative and beta–binomial models provide similar fits, substantially better than that of the double-binomial model. All models show that both the probability that the child is a boy and the dispersion are greater in larger families. There is also some indication that a point probability mass is needed for families containing children uniquely of one sex.     

All-Union population census: family structure

This is a continuation of a previous series of tables on family structure in the USSR, based on data from the 1979 census. Data are included on the size and nationality of families among the urban, rural, and total populations of each Union Republic.     

Education of women and changes in the family model in Poland

Trends in women's education in Poland for the period 1960-1986 are reviewed, with a focus on the status of women and the allocation of women's time. The author concludes that the rapid changes in women's educational status that have occurred are not matched by equally rapid changes in family behavior.     

A. V. Chayanov on family size and the peasant household

The author describes the life and works of A. V. Chayanov, an agricultural economist in the USSR. His works emphasized the link between the size of peasant families and their economic status, and he concluded that the larger the family, the more prosperous the household. The author suggests that Chayanov's methodology for analyzing the demographic development of peasant families and households is still viable today.     

Conditionally Reducible Natural Exponential Families and Enriched Conjugate Priors

Consider a standard conjugate family of prior distributions for a vector-parameter indexing an exponential family. Two distinct model parameterizations may well lead to standard conjugate families which are not consistent, i.e. one family cannot be derived from the other by the usual change-of-variable technique. This raises the problem of finding suitable parameterizations that may lead to enriched conjugate families which are more flexible than the traditional ones. The previous remark motivates the definition of a new property for an exponential family, named conditional reducibility. Features of conditionally-reducible natural exponential families are investigated thoroughly. In particular, we relate this new property to the notion of cut, and show that conditionally-reducible families admit a reparameterization in terms of a vector having likelihood-independent components. A general methodology to obtain enriched conjugate distributions for conditionally-reducible families is described in detail, generalizing previous works and more recent contributions in the area. The theory is illustrated with reference to natural exponential families having simple quadratic variance function.     

FAMILY BUILDING DIFFERENCES BETWEEN SAME SEX AND MIXED SEX FAMILIES IN AUSTRALIA

From this investigation it seems that an aversion among some couples to a same sex family has some relevance in family building. However, although there are significant differences in the proportions of same sex and mixed sex families having an additional child, the overall effect on average family size of the (apparent) attempt to achieve a child of each sex appears to be slight—an increase of less than 3% in the case of the Melbourne data. Despite the evidence that a significantly greater proportion of women with same sex families have another child, relatively few women admit that the sex structure of the children was the main factor in such a decision. Another insight into the relationship between sex structure and family building was that the desire for a child of each sex may have a negative effect on fertility in that couples who have already achieved such a configuration may decide not to have an additional child that they had originally planned to have. Obviously, it is difficult to separate attitudes to the importance of having both sons and daughters from rationalisations associated with the sex structure of the respondent's own family. Nevertheless the desire for children of each sex seems to be related to traditional attitudes to woman's role, Southern European background, an earlier year of birth, and a lower level of education. However, at the same time women in these categories, particularly the last, seem to be relatively less likely to exhibit behaviour indicative of a controlled response to the sex structure of the family; thus among such groups the probability of same sex families having another child is found to be relatively similar to the proportion of mixed sex families having another child. In other words, they are less likely than other women, who care less about having both sons and daughters, to stop at two (or three) children when at least one son and one daughter have been attained. What of the future relationship between proportions of same sex and mixed sex families having another child? Although it would seem that the combined effect of better educational opportunities and less traditional attitudes of each new generation would further reduce the importance attached to having both sons and daughters, at the same time one would expect an increase in a couple's ability to stop family building when two or three children of the desired sex structure had been achieved. Another factor is that possibly an increasing preference for smaller families will outweigh the wish to have a third (or fourth) child to achieve one child of each sex or for any other reason.     

Adding functions to ensure regression converges

Regression fits a curve to data by minimizing a function of the residuals. The process of fitting a family of functions may fail to converge because the family of candidate functions has no minimum. After investigating what functions to add to a family to ensure a minimum exists, four families are examined. The family of polynomials needs no additional functions. Additional functions are found for the families of exponential growth curves, probit curves, and logistic curves. A sufficient condition tells when the minimum is not in the original family.     

Comparing two treatments in terms of the likelihood ratio order

In this paper new families of test-statistics are introduced and studied for the problem of comparing two treatments in terms of the likelihood ratio order. The considered families are based on φ-divergence measures and arise as natural extensions of the classical likelihood ratio test and Pearson test-statistics. It is proven that their asymptotic distribution is a common chi-bar random variable. An illustrative example is presented and the performance of these statistics is analysed through a simulation study. Through a simulation study it is shown that, for most of the proposed scenarios adjusted to be small or moderate, some members of this new family of test-statistic display clearly better performance with respect to the power in comparison to the classical likelihood ratio and the Pearson's chi-square test while the exact size remains closed to the nominal size. In view of the exact powers and significance levels, the study also shows that the Wilcoxon test-statistic is not as good as the two classical test-statistics.     

Statistical Comparison of the Goodness of Fit Delivered by Five Families of Distributions Used in Distribution Fitting

A basic assumption in distribution fitting is that a single family of distributions may deliver useful representation to the universe of available distributions. To date, little study has been conducted to compare the relative effectiveness of these families. In this article, five families are compared by fitting them to a sample of 20 distributions, using 2 fitting objectives: minimization of the L ₂ norm and four-moment matching. Values of L ₂ norm associated with the fitted families are used as input data to test for significant differences. The Pearson family and the RMM (Response Modeling Methodology) family significantly outperforms all other families.     

A note on the accuracy of fisher's approximation to the large sample variance of an intraclass correlationa

The adequacy of Fisher's approximation to the large sample variance of an intraclass correlation is investigated in the context of family studies. It is found that the approximation is highly accurate in samples of moderately large size (≧ 30 families), and can also be used for significance-testing under a broad range of circumstances. The exact sampling of distribution of the intraclass correlation coefficient is also derived.     

Existence of nested designs with block size five

The block designs considered here are nested in the unified sense of Preece (Biometrika 54 (1967) 479–486) and Federer (in: T.A. Baneroft (Ed.), Statistical Papers in Honor of George W. Snedecor, 1972, pp. 91–114), that is, each block of the larger balanced incomplete block design contains several distinguished families of mutually disjoint sub-blocks, the sub-blocks of the same family belonging to the same system, such that each system forms the collection of blocks of some balanced incomplete block design. In this paper, it is shown that the necessary conditions for the existence of such designs are also sufficient for block size 5 and sub-block sizes 2 and 3. This, together with known results, implies the entire existence of such designs with block size 5 in general.     

The shapes of things to come: probability density quantiles

For every discrete or continuous location-scale family having a square-integrable density, there is a unique continuous probability distribution on the unit interval that is determined by the density-quantile composition introduced by Parzen in 1979. These probability density quantiles (pdQs) only differ in shape, and can be usefully compared with the Hellinger distance or Kullback–Leibler divergences. Convergent empirical estimates of these pdQs are provided, which leads to a robust global fitting procedure of shape families to data. Asymmetry can be measured in terms of distance or divergence of pdQs from the symmetric class. Further, a precise classification of shapes by tail behaviour can be defined simply in terms of pdQ boundary derivatives.     

On a Unified Generalized Quasi–likelihood Approach for Familial–Longitudinal Non‐Stationary Count Data

Abstract. In this paper, conditional on random family effects, we consider an auto‐regression model for repeated count data and their corresponding time‐dependent covariates, collected from the members of a large number of independent families. The count responses, in such a set up, unconditionally exhibit a non‐stationary familial–longitudinal correlation structure. We then take this two‐way correlation structure into account, and develop a generalized quasilikelihood (GQL) approach for the estimation of the regression effects and the familial correlation index parameter, whereas the longitudinal correlation parameter is estimated by using the well‐known method of moments. The performance of the proposed estimation approach is examined through a simulation study. Some model mis‐specification effects are also studied. The estimation methodology is illustrated by analysing real life healthcare utilization count data collected from 36 families of size four over a period of 4 years.     

Demographic policy in the light of the resolutions of the Twenty-sixth Congress of the Communist Party

The USSR is moving from extensive to intensive type of population reproduction, not because of any governmental measures but as a reaction to objective circumstances. At present there is a reduction in the population cohort of working age. This has an adverse effect on production. And the number of the elderly is increasing; we must involve them more in the production process, in monitoring the service sphere, for instance. The infant mortality rate has declined sharply in the USSR, especially since World War II. The birthrate has also dropped, but it is still higher than in the US, France, or West Germany. Some authorities think that this (the ZPG) is a good idea, but this author thinks it is a bad idea, meaning a drop in society's productive forces. We need an active demographic policy, meaning one which ensures optimal reproduction of the population with an improvement in its health, culture, and living standard. The policy must be differentiated, as conditions vary from one part of the country to another. An example is the 1981 decree on assistance to families with children which provides for payments of 35-50 rubles/month to mothers who must stay home to look after children. The number of children per family to ensure reproduction must be 2.6 on the average. In the Central Asian republics family sizes of 4-5 children are anticipated, but in the RSFSR, Ukraine, Belorussia, and the Baltic republics the anticipated size of families is rather low. Measures must be taken to alter this by providing assistance to families with children.