Interstate variations in teenage fertility

The extremely wide variation among states in adolescent childbearing is examined using indicators that represent high or low modernity, i.e., percent urban, percent fundamentalism, percent black, and region (South-non-South); the intermediate variables of factors affecting exposure to intercourse (percent married females 15 to 19); and the deliberate fertility control factor of induced abortion (the state abortion-to-live birth ratio). Eighty-six percent of the variance among states in the 1974 teenage fertility rates (females 15 to 19) is explained, with region the most powerful single indicator of fertility, followed by percent married and state abortion ratio.     

Exploring the Myth of Unhappiness in Former Communist Countries: The Roles of the Sex Gap in Life Expectancy and the Marital Status Composition

National average happiness and the difference in happiness between women and men are positively correlated in European countries. This study focuses on this cross-country relationship and tests (1) whether, after controlling for socio-economic factors, the correlation is attributed to their direct relationship, or, alternatively, explained by the sex difference in life expectancy, and (2) whether the correlation is not only exogenously explained but also endogenously generated by the sex difference in life expectancy. Performing regression analyses, this study shows that the correlation between happiness and its sex difference is spurious, and that the sex difference in life expectancy generates this correlation and accounts for about one-third of the correlation. A decline in happiness influences men’s mortality more than women’s, and widens the life expectancy gap between women and men. This in turn raises the widowhood ratio among women, lowers women’s average happiness, and reduces the happiness gap between women and men. The results obtained in this study points to the importance of controlling for the demographic composition of the population when we use aggregate happiness measures as national happiness indicators.     

Measures of self-reported well-being: their affective,cognitive, and other components

This investigation begins from the hypothesis that social indicators of perceived well-being — e.g., people's assessment of their own life quality — will, like other attudes, reflect two basic types of influences: affect and cognition. In addition, the indicators were expected to include two other components: unique variance (mainly random measurement error) and correlated measurement error. These ideas are investigated using a structural modeling approach applied to 23 assessments of life-as-a-whole from a national survey of Americans (N=1072) and/or a survey of urban residents in England (N=932). In both sets of data, models that included affective and cognitive factors fit significantly better than more restricted models. Furthermore, as expected, measures of (a) ‘happiness’, ‘fun’, and ‘enjoyment’ tended to be relatively more loaded with affect than were measures of (b) ‘satisfaction’, ‘success’, and ‘meeting needs’; and (c) measures designed to tap both affect and cognition tended to fall between the first two groups. In addition, the results suggest that measures employing relatively many scale points and direct assessments yield more valid indicators of people's evaluations of life-as-a-whole than do measures based on three-point scales or on explicit comparisons with other times or groups. These results contribute to basic knowledge about the nature of life quality assessments, help to explain some previously puzzling relationships with demographic factors such as age and education, and may be useful to designers of future studies of perceived well-being.     

The Characteristics of Children’s Subjective Well-Being

Despite the increased interest in recent decades in the study of children’s subjective well-being (SWB), much too little is known about the factors that contribute to their SWB, especially with regards to socio-demographic characteristics. In addition, only handful of studies has made a comparison between countries and was based on large samples. The present study is a first of its kind. Utilizing the International Study of Children’s Well-Being first wave data set with questionnaires from over 34,500 children from 14 different countries to explore the characteristics of children’s SWB and the relations between an array of socio-demographic variables and children’s SWB. SWB was measured using three scales—overall life satisfaction, overall satisfaction in specific domains and overall SWB that was measured using agreement items. The socio-demographic variables were composed of demographic characteristics (e.g. gender and age), self-reported socio-economic items and the children’s country of residence. Findings show that children’s SWB in all countries is relatively high, although some variation can be found between the three SWB scales. Differences were found between the three measurements of SWB in regard to the explained variance, nevertheless the socio-demographic characteristics explain relatively low amount of the variance in SWB (10.9–20.2 %). The demographic variables have the lowest contribution, followed by the socio-economic items, while countries have the highest contribution. Thus one of our main conclusions is that the answer for understanding children’s SWB does not lay in the socio-demographic characteristics. The implications of these findings for further research of children’s SWB are discussed.     

Christian–Muslim differences in child survival in Egypt

Ethnic and religious inequalities in child survival have been documented in many countries. In Egypt, during the 1980s and 1990s, Christians had higher childhood mortality than Muslims despite their higher socio-economic status (SES) and concentration in urban areas. This paper explores reasons for this Christian–Muslim mortality gap. Data for this study are drawn from Egypt’s 1988, 1992, 1995, 2005 and 2008 Demographic and Health Surveys, which recorded the respondents’ religious affiliation. The main analysis compares children of Christian and Muslim mothers in survival to age five using proportional hazards Cox regression models. Results indicate that differences in the regional distributions of Christians and Muslims positively contributed to the mortality gap during the 1980s–1990s. The majority of Christians resided in Upper Egypt where childhood mortality rates were considerably higher than in other regions. However, only part of higher Christian mortality can be explained by their regional concentration. In Upper Egypt, despite their higher SES, as well as greater urban residence, Christians had higher mortality than Muslims. These findings are at odds with research demonstrating the significance of SES and urban concentration in explaining ethnic–religious mortality gaps.     

Settler Welfare on Tropical Forest Frontiers in Latin America

Because of urgent concerns to protect tropical forests in Latin America, social science research on them has been generally ‘forest-centred.’ This forest-centred approach considers the people who inhabit the frontier as agents of land use change and forest conversion focusing on how their actions affect forest cover. Welfare indicators for forest frontier populations (income, education, health, access to basic services) are addressed only incidentally in terms of how they influence land use. ‘People’ centred research, which asks questions from the perspective of human welfare such as, ‘Are frontier settlers better off than they were before?’ or ‘What kind of socio-economic impacts does frontier life have on the people who live there?” and “How can their lives be improved?,” has been less common. As a result, we know much about the impacts, especially adverse impacts, which settler activity on the frontier has on forest cover but little about the impacts settlement has on settlers, themselves. This paper attempts to shift discussion towards these kinds of questions and a more people centred approach by reviewing existing research that directly addresses the welfare of settlers in tropical forest frontiers in Latin America. We also review research that touches on settler welfare by considering the concept of ‘sustainability’ on the forest frontier and stakes out a comprise position between ‘forest’ and ‘people’ centred questions or concerns. Settler welfare is defined primarily in economic terms. Household income, wealth, and agricultural productivity are interpreted a proxies for welfare in most cases. We also consider welfare in terms of access to basic services (health and education) and living conditions. We particularly consider how settler welfare indicators may change over time on the frontier. Tropical forests, defined as tropical, moist, broadleaf forests, are the main ecological setting of interest. These forests are generally the largest unoccupied areas in many Latin American countries and are thus, also the main ‘agricultural frontier’ or areas of new settlement by small farmers.     

Indicators of development in Wisconsin counties: 1970

This research focused on the problem of measuring economic and social ‘development’. Existing theories of economic and social change were used to select important indicators of development. For each indicator, principal components analysis was used to collapse several related variables into a single index. The indexes were labeled economic base, economic growth, personal economic opportunity, health inputs, health status, educational inputs, and educational attainment. In each case, selection of variables and indexes were constrained by two factors: (1) the data had to be available from secondary sources; (2) the selection of the indicators, and the procedure, had to be easily understood and cheaply and quickly repeatable by state or local agency personnel. In general the indexes were consistent with each other and the variables enter into the indexes with the expected sign. The high correlation among the indexes suggests that they may indeed measure some underlying attribute, development. There is no rigorous or absolute measure of development against which to check the validity of the indexes. However, the results have been judged ‘reasonable’ measures of development by the state agency staff and local development groups which have utilized the indexes.     

Explaining Low Subjective Well-Being of Persons with Disabilities in Europe: The Impact of Disability, Personal Resources, Participation and Socio-Economic Status

Persons with chronic disabilities report the lowest subjective well-being (SWB) in many countries. The gap in SWB compared with the non-disabled population is smaller in some countries than in others. Data from the European Social Survey were analysed in order to: (1) describe the inequality in SWB in 21 European countries; and (2) identify the main determinants of this inequality in SWB. Data on a range of topics of a total of 40,605 persons, including 2,846 persons with serious chronic disabilities, were used of the European Social Survey. SWB was measured using multi-item scales for ‘emotional well-being’ and ‘satisfying life’. Variables on disability, socio-demographics (age, gender, household composition), socio-economic status (level of education, net household income), participation (paid work, voluntary work, social contacts), and personal resources (supportive relationships, social cohesion, vitality, optimism, resilience, perceived autonomy, perceived accomplishment, perceived capacity, perceived engagement, perceived meaning and purpose) were entered stepwise in regression models of SWB. The results show that persons with disabilities are in a disadvantaged position in terms of SWB in all countries. In the Northern countries, the gaps between disabled and non-disabled persons are smaller than in Eastern European countries. In all countries inequality in SWB is explained mostly by personal resources and not by the level of disability, socio-economic status or level of participation in work. The implications of these findings for policy and practice (e.g. social cohesion and physical exercise programs) are discussed.     

Fertility and social mobility

This article contains an analysis of part of the results of an inquiry into social mobility undertaken jointly by the Nuffield Research Unit of the London School of Economics and the Population Investigation Committee, in collaboration with the Ministry of Labour, based on nation-wide sample material collected by the Social Survey in England and Wales in 1949. Grateful acknowledgment is made to the Inter-Departmental Committee on Economic and Social Research for facilitating the collaboration with these government departments. In this paper, the relationship between fertility defined in terms of average family size of marriages of at least twenty years duration and social mobility is discussed. Two aspects of the latter phenomenon are discussed, namely, the position of sons on the social scale in relation to that of their fathers, and the change in the social status of a family in the period between the date of marriage and the date of the inquiry.

The conclusions reached stand in apparent contradiction to R. A. Fisher's ‘Theory of Infertility Selection’. It is shown that socially promoted families tend on the one hand to carry with them the family-building habits of the class of their origin, and, on the other, to acquire to some extent the fertility characteristics of the class into which they move.

The study of ‘personal’ social mobility throws some light on the question of the choice of the time-basis of socio-economic status allocation.     

The impact of professional and personal satisfaction on perceptions of rural and urban: Some analytic evidence

Studies of rural-urban location decisions traditionally used ana priori definition of rural/urban based on population size. A group of 29 physicians (study group) practising in communities of less than 10 000, that were part of a larger sample, perceived their communities as ‘urban’. A matched group of physicians (control group) in the same communities, who perceived the communities as ‘rural’, was selected. The research question raised was: Are there personal and professional factors that could reliably predict the perception of rural and urban? A logistic regression analysis was done using professional and personal satisfaction items as predictors of the two groups. The analysis gives some evidence that, once the effect of community size is removed, the perception of rural urban can be explained by satisfaction with the following: (i) access to specialist expertise, (ii) quality of education for children, (iii) quality of life for children and (iv) quality of housing; satisfaction with size of community was not a significant predictor of rural/urban perception.     

Socio-Economic Disparities in the Development of the Romania’s Border Areas

The Romanian border areas include 898 Local Administrative Units 2 (LAU2), of which 88 are urban and 810 rural. Romania has borderline with the following countries: Bulgaria, Republic of Moldova, Serbia, Ukraine, Hungary, of which 63.5 % is Non-European Union boundary. According to the population structure, 51.6 % of the total population is urban and the rest of 48.4 % is rural. In order to assess the socio-economic territorial disparities in the development of the urban space of Romanian border areas, several research stages were carried out: selecting 22 relevant statistical indicators, analyzing territorial disparities, standardizing the absolute values of the indicators, grouping the elementary indicators by 7 multiple indicator clusters (secondary indexes) in order to reflect the main socio-economic development aspects: (1) housing, (2) public utilities infrastructure and green areas, (3) health, (4) labour market, (5) demography, (6) education and (7) local economy. Finally, the authors were able to compute secondary indexes and the Index of Socio-Economic Development as Hull Score with a mean of 50 and a standard deviation of 14, revealing the levels of socio-economic development (high, average and low). Generally, the outcomes of the current study are in line with Romania’s complex socio-economic disparities, rooted in the historic background of the country. Spatially, the economic development follows a West–East direction, the less developed areas being concentrated in the Eastern and Southern part of the country.     

Does Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Matter for Children’s Health Status? Insights from Northern Ghana

Given that women in rural communities in developing countries are responsible for the nutrition and health-related decisions affecting children in their care, their empowerment may influence the health status of their children. The association between women’s empowerment, measured by using a recently developed Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index, and children’s health status is examined for a sample of households in Northern Ghana applying a Multiple Indicators Multiple Causes (MIMIC) model. The MIMIC approach is used to link multiple indicator variables with multiple independent variables through a “single underlying” latent variable. Height-for-age and weight-for-height z-scores are used as indicators of the underlying children’s health status and women’s empowerment in agriculture and control variables are used as the multiple independent variables. Our results show that neither the composite empowerment score used to capture women’s empowerment in agriculture nor its decomposed components are statistically significant in their association with the latent children’s health status. However, the associations between children’s health status and control variables such as mother’s education, child’s age, household’s hunger scale and residence locale are statistically significant. Results also confirm the existence of the ‘single underlying’ common latent variable. Of the two health status indicators, height-for-age scores and weight-for- height scores, the former exhibited a relatively stronger association with the latent health status. While promoting women’s empowerment to enhance their ability to make strategic life choices, it is important to carefully consider how the achievement of these objectives will impact the women’s well-being and the well-being of the children in their care.     

Does Municipal Socioeconomic Development Affect Public Perceptions of Crime? A Multilevel Logistic Regression Analysis

Chile is considered as one of the safest countries in Latin America, with a below-the-average world crime rate. However, during the last few decades, the country has experienced a deterioration in public perceptions of safety. This paper investigates public perceptions of crime in the 52 municipalities of the metropolitan area of Santiago, by employing an index of socioeconomic development for each municipality. Multilevel logistic regression analysis is used in order to assess the impact of individual and municipal-level variables on perceptions of crime in these municipalities. The results show that women exhibit higher perceptions of crime, while people living in rural areas, inactive people, and people with higher education and income have generally lower perceptions. Multidimensional poverty is positively associated with high perceptions of crime, while municipal spending on health and/or education does not show a relationship with perceptions of crime. Regarding socioeconomic development level of municipalities, the results show that people living in municipalities of high development show the lowest perceptions of crime, despite the fact that these municipalities do actually exhibit the highest crime rates, a fact confirming the ‘perception gap’ and the ‘neighbourhood favouritism’ theories. The results and conclusions of this study can be used not only by local policy-makers but also by officials in other cities that—like Santiago—are characterised by high urban segregation.     

On the ‘Urbanness’ of Metropolitan Areas: Testing the Homogeneity Assumption, 1970–2000

In recent decades, population dynamics, have made definitions of what localities are rural or urban somewhat unclear. The vast majority of demographic work has simply used metropolitan classifications with various forms of a non-metropolitan residual (e.g., adjacent to metro versus non-adjacent). The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) periodically redefines metropolitan areas, which makes temporal comparisons difficult. In fact, some demographers have offered the idea that, due to these shifting reclassifications, the so-called “rural rebound” is a misnomer, in that non-metropolitan counties that transitioned to metropolitan status were, in fact, already more ‘urban’ than those that did not become reclassified as metropolitan (Johnson et al 2005). This argument depends largely on the assumption of homogeneity in rural or urban ‘character’ in those counties. Following arguments by others (Wilkinson 1991; Isserman 2001; Bogue 1950), we take population and land use into account to examine whether these transitional counties were more or less urban than comparable others, all at the county level for the contiguous 48 states for 1970–2000. Our results show that adjacent non-metropolitan counties that were later reclassified as metropolitan were indeed characterized by a larger population and heavier urban land cover than those not making this transition. However, the results also show that metropolitan areas were also quite heterogeneous in terms of traditionally rural activities. A discussion of the homogeneity assumption in demographers’ conceptualization of metropolitan areas is included.     

Quantitative output of the criminal justice system

Time series trends in the processing of the seven major Index Offenses are assessed over the years 1953–76. Five types of offense-standardized criminal justice processing indicators are defined (arrest, clearance, formal charge, guilty-as-charged, and guilty-but-reduced rates or ratios) and calculated. Comparing patterns over time to evaluate overall processing trends, these data indicate generally positive correlations of processing indicators over the period studied and confirm the hypothesized decline in processing input-output rates and ratios since about 1960. The hypothesized impact of crime rates and juvenile arrest percentage upon these trends is supported generally by structural equation and difference equation analysis. Our analysis indicates that much of the processing trend indeed can be explained in terms of caseload pressures and the proportion of juvenile arrests which drive down the ‘performance’ of the examined processing indicators.     

Rural/urban differentials in demographic processes: The Central Asian states

While the populations of the Central Asian successor states are extremely heterogeneous on many indicators, the issue of rural or urban residence is consistently important in terms of differentials in population growth, socio-economic status and public health. In this paper I focus on rural population trends in Kazakhstan, Kyrghyzstan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. I explore the relatively disadvantaged position of rural inhabitants as well as regional variations within the rural population. The differentials in fertility and mortality rates and the large projected population increases indicate that future policy interventions and data collection efforts should incorporate a specific focus on rural areas.     

Patterns of inter- and intra-regional inequality: A socio-economic approach

The regional development pattern of five regions, viz., North, South, Tropical America, Tropical Asia and Tropical Africa [see Theil (1989)] is studied using two indices based on a group of representative socio-economic indicators. The analysis is based on measures of ‘inequality’ and ‘mobility’. Comparison of results using these indices and the Per Capita Gross Domestic Product (PCGDP) reveals that while the situation with respect to PCGDP has worsened over the years, that with respect to the socio-economic indicators has become better.     

Regional disparities in Malaysia

Visualizing the level of living as a level of satisfaction of the needs of the population assured by a given flow of goods and services in a unit of time, several sets of components which are judged capable of representing the various aspects of the level of living are chosen for eleven states of Malaysia. Indices of levels of living disparities, within the framework developed by Frederick Harbison and associates, which are called ‘pattern of development’ and ‘measure of development’ are established for eleven states of Malaysia based on 16 socio-economic indicators in order to get a clear picture of regional socio-economic disparities in this country.     

Famine,Maternal Nutrition and Infant Mortality: A Re-examination of the Dutch Hunger Winter

During the Dutch Hunger Winter (1945), a unique, documented example of mass famine in an industrialized population, total reproductive loss (fetal and infant mortality) among most exposed mothers remained relatively low. This is explained by highly favourable fetal mortality and unfavourable infant mortality. The author traces the pattern of low fetal mortality to the higher levels of ‘embodied health status’ of famine mothers. The high infant mortality of the famine area testifies to the severity of the food and fuel shortage, yet another factor held down the rate of stillbirth. This other factor, it is argued, has a socio-economic character, it is the intrinsic ‘embodied’ nutritional status of the regional population, arising from favourable opportunities for growth and development among successive generations of mothers. This explanation highlights the importance of maternal vitality, (a synthetic, historically variable and culturally determined phenomenon) as a neglected feature of historical demography.