Anthropological demography

This study aims to examine the trends in social and geographical variations in SRB in Korea. .The data was taken from “Vital Statistics Birth” for the period from 1981 to 2005. We computed the annual male proportion of live births according to mother’s education, mother’s occupation and geography, demonstrating three year moving average. Logistic regression analysis was employed to estimate the odds ratios of male birth according to social and residential groups. SRB in Korea was more prominent in higher social groups and Seoul dwellers until the early 1980’s, but the ratio reversed to be higher in the less educated, manual-job, and country-living mothers since the late 1980’s. The socioeconomic and geographical gap in SRB was most notable in the early 1990s when the SRB in the country was at its peak, and from the late 1990s onwards, the gap has since narrowed. This unique South Korean phenomenon of a social and geographical reversal pattern in SRB supports the diffusion theory of people adopting medical technology for sex selective abortion, suggesting a model to predict the future trends in countries exhibiting an imbalance in SRB.

Mothering in Japanese society is very important. Mothers are expected to raise and educate children in a society valuing harmony and regularities. They tend to see themselves more as mothers than individuals once they have a child, which is said to contribute to lower labor force participation rates. This paper examines the meaning and significance of mothering in Japan and explores how mothering is internalized. In particular, it focuses on the practice of parent-child co-sleeping, which is common in the child-centered Japanese family. The practice is so instilled that it is unquestioned and, hence, has rarely received academic attention. However, in light of current demographic conditions that promote higher female labor force participation, this sleeping arrangement should be critically examined. Data for this paper were collected via focus group discussions involving 36 participants (both males and females) living in Tokyo. Findings show that participants value mothering because it is how they were raised. The high mothering standard is, in part, deterring women not only from continuing to work, but also ironically, from deciding to become a mother or have multiple children.

Despite its quantitative tradition, demography has become more aligned with qualitative research over the past 15 years. There has been a growing recognition that quantitative research offers little information about ideals, motivations, intentions, cultural aspects, and processes that surround demographic events. Therefore, many of the important questions relating to demography cannot be answered through the sole use of a quantitative approach. The objective of the paper is to investigate the production of qualitative research in demography during the 21st century. The analysis is based on the articles published in four major journals: Demography, Demographic Research, Revista Brasileira de Estudos de População - REBEP, and Revista Latinoamericana de Población- RELAP. We quantify the papers that use qualitative techniques, their authors and institutional affiliations, countries/regions under study, while also qualifying the findings by answering the following question: what have we learned from these qualitative studies that we would not have learned from quantitative data? Using content analysis, we investigate the papers published in all volumes of the journals between 2001 and 2013, except for RELAP, which was first published in 2007. The papers published in these four jorunals are predominantly quantitative.

Network of relatives. Composition and changes throughout the life course.

Demographic change, more specifically “population ageing”, has spurred a renewed interest in “solidarity” ─ cf. the title of the Green Paper (2009) of the European Commission, “Intergenerational solidarity: key to responding to demographic ageing.”
According to Parsons (1968), the primary unit of solidarity is the family. The interrelationships of family members reveal the three basic forms of solidarity: affectional solidarity, associational solidarity; and consensus solidarity.
The analysis gives a description of the composition of the network of family members and the changes therein through the life course. The analysis is based on the data of the Belgian GGP survey of around 2010.
The results reveal that, overall, the number of family members is low. Moreover, the composition of the network and the number of family members greatly varies with age. The results also reveal differences between men and women and the existence of cultural difference, namely differences in the composition of reconstituted families. Moreover, the increased importance in reconstituted families raises the question of the need for new forms of solidarity between step-parents and step-children.

Identifying what « single parent household » are becomes a challenging task in an era of new family forms and related legislations regulating the care and responsibilities of children. Official statistics hardly reflect a composite reality of households between which children circulate and where parental relationships with biological and non-biological parents change during the life course. On the basis of an explorative qualitative study in Switzerland, we focus of the blurry borders of single parent households and on the life course pattern of individuals living as solo parents. We analyze the life course of individuals whose entry to the single parent state fits one of these two patterns: a) becoming single parent as the consequence of a couple project which got interrupted (separation, divorce, or widowhood) ; b) single parent in the absence of a couple project (contraceptive failure, partner non acceptance of parenthood, single parenthood as a life choice). We propose a multidimensional definition of single parents that takes into account both the objective life trajectories of parents and children and subjective dimension of individuals categorized as single parents. We highlight the importance of a longitudinal perspective on single parent households to understand their dynamics and to develop better-adapted policies to

In the context of the existing nutrition transition, this paper tries to assess the possible existence of the double burden of malnutrition, that is, the simultaneous existence of underweight and overweight problems, in Indian society. The paper throws light on the evidence of the changing face of malnutrition among the ever-married women in India, analysing data from NFHS-2 (1998-99) and NFHS-3 (2005-06). The new classification of overweight and obesity for the Asian population as prescribed by WHO (2004) has been considered besides the traditional definition. In 2006, around half of the women were malnourished. Over these seven years time, the pace of decline of underweight proportion has been one-third as compared to the rate of increment in overweight. Considering the Asian standard cut-off points for overweight and obesity, the scenario gets worse, as one-fourth of the women were overweight. The underweight problem seems to cut across all social and economic categories, whereas, the overweight/obesity problem seems to be more of a problem of wealthier, urban women, exposing them towards double burden of malnutrition. Hence, the research and policies in India has to focus on the paradoxical co-existence of underweight and overweight problems among women to tackle this emerging issue.

Health issues in urban areas of developing countries, which are experiencing a rapid growth but are characterized with lack of infrastructure, have been subject to researches in recent times under the massive rate of urbanization and rural to urban migration. The main objective of this study is to examine the health inequality in urban India and the health status of urban poor as compared to rural average in India. We have used the data from National Family Health Survey-3. To show the inequalities we have calculated Kuznet’s Index, Dissimilarity Index and Human Opportunity Index (HOI) values. We have carried out bivariate and multi-variate analysis over the indicators like, home and institutional deliveries, assisted deliveries, immunization, undernourishment, breastfeeding, anaemia, birthweight and also child health. We have found that though the urban people seem to be much healthier as compared to rural, the inequality indices show that urban health is no better than the average health of rural people, as depicted by Kuznet’s index for complete immunization, institutional deliveries, breastfeeding or child health. The result urges policymakers to focus urgently on urban health especially among poor, besides their rural concern, since urban health being further aggravated with poor infrastructure and environmental condition.

On November 21, 2012, a new census will be fielded in Bolivia, the first since 2001. All residents will be required to stay in their homes in order to be available to census enumerators. Since the amount of resources that each rural and urban municipality receives from the state is based on the number of inhabitants recorded in the census, maximizing that number recorded locally has become a crucial goal for municipal and community leaders. They have been demanding that every person be present in their real or de jure “home”. In some cases, they have threatened sanctions against migrants who do not return to that home. Given the high rates of internal migration in El Alto —estimates from the 2001 census show that for every migrant that leaves El Alto, five arrive— these threats suggest that the forthcoming census will trigger considerable pre- and post-census population flows. In turn, this suggests that census data on population distributions across high in- and out-migrant districts will be flawed

Understanding wellbeing at the household level is important as this helps inform the design of poverty alleviation and development programs for developing countries. There exist both objective and subjective ways of doing this. Whereas objective measures of poverty/wellbeing have commonly been used, the subjective approach to understanding wellbeing is becoming a common phenomenon in poverty studies, with more of these being conducted in order to get the participatory appraisal of wellbeing. These subjective measures of wellbeing are becoming increasingly common because of the realization that objective (economic) measures alone are not sufficient to understand poverty and wellbeing, especially in the developing context as they have been found to be wanting. Understanding development using non-monetary factors, particularly the dynamics of socio-economic development, is also an important approach for the developing context since it accords development experts a chance to design appropriate strategies focused on the developing world context. Using both and subjective measures of wellbeing, this study investigates Makueni residents’ perceptions of development in relation to both approaches of wellbeing. This research which is on-going uses factor analysis (objective measure) and polychoric principal component analysis (subjective)

In Cambodia modern contraceptives are cheaply available and morally acceptable, yet unmet need remains high. Furthermore, some wealthy, educated, urbanites are choosing to shun modern methods in favour of traditional contraceptives. This paper explains this seemingly counter-intuitive behaviour. The research design takes a mixed methods approach, initially using data from the Cambodian DHS 2005 to assess trends in contraceptive use and logistic regression to analyse traditional method use. The likelihood of using traditional, rather than modern, methods, increased as education and wealth increased. Taking these findings and the questions they raise as a departure point, 21 months of ethnographic fieldwork was conducted in Cambodia. Periodic abstinence, labelled ‘traditional’ by demographers, is known locally as ‘the doctor’s way’; regarded as suitable only for ‘knowledgeable people’ who use the foreign calendar. Furthermore it conforms to dominant Khmer ideals of femininity. Behaviour that appeared counter-intuitive - wealthy educated women choosing traditional over modern methods – is explained when viewed within the specific context and system of meaning. The research contributes to anthropological demography by bringing approaches and methods from medical anthropology to the typically demographic issue of contraceptive use.