The demography of ethnicity, culture and language

Recently, thanks to the increased presence of hot demographical topics on the Internet and the media, demographic themes have become accessible to and enjoyed by a wider public. Among non scientific fields, film production is particularly interesting because it represents a means of communication with a strong cultural impact. The aim of our work is to investigate in what way migration has been represented in a procedure that is not the traditional one of scientific research: following a quantitative approach, we intend to look through the European film production of the last twenty years to see the image of the migrant and of the phenomenon of migration that is transmitted in the destination countries.
The first step was the creation of a specific Database on European films on Migratory topics (EMFD). The second step consisted of carrying out multivariate statistical analysis that showed how the representation of migration is very close to reality.
The work carried out highlights a new perspective for socio-demographic studies, though there still remains the problem of constructing exhaustive qualitative and quantitative databases. The value of this contribution lies in having taken the first step in this direction.

This paper examines disparity in childhood malnutrition (underweight) across the ethnic groups in India and its region using three rounds of the National Family Health Survey conducted during 1992-2006. Descriptive statistics and pooled logistic regression analysis were applied to measure the disparity in childhood malnutrition across the ethnic groups. The prevalence of underweight differs considerably between the Scheduled castes/Scheduled tribes (SC/ST) and other caste; underweight among the SC/ST in India being substantially higher than other caste. The prevalence has declined among the other caste while it has stagnated among SC/ST over the study period. Pooled logistic regression results suggest that the disparity in underweight has increased across the ethnic groups in India over the last two decades. The findings call for dedicated policies, in line with those already existing to improve the socio-economic status of the SC/ST in India, to tackle the rampant childhood malnutrition among the SC/ST in India.

In 2012, a new national survey among homeless populations was carried out in France by INSEE and INED, 11 years after the first one. According to an indirect sampling design, users of services dedicated to homeless people (shelters, soup kitchens…) were randomly selected for a face-to-face interview or a short self-administered questionnaire (SAQ). For the first time, non-French speakers were also surveyed in order to improve the field coverage of the survey and to obtain information about these little-known populations. Thus, the SAQ has been translated into 14 languages supposed to be the most used by non-French speaking users of services, and tested. Eventually, around 5800 SAQ were collected, filled in by natives of 120 different countries.
This presentation will cover the various steps of the protocol focussing on two main difficulties: identifying the “right” languages used by the non-French speaking homeless population; adapting and translating the SAQ, taking into account literacy skills and cultural conventions. Then, a mapping of the languages used by respondents and an assessment of the data quality based on a behaviour coding of the responses will be discussed. To what extent does data quality reflect the literacy skills of respondents or their subjectivity?

According to the 2010 census, China had a population of 1.33 billion, of which 8% belonged to the 52 ethnic minorities ranging in size from about 4,000 to 17 million people. This paper presents an analysis of the 2010 census data pertaining to the 18 ethnic groups which had a population in excess of 2 million persons each. Corresponding data for the majority Han have been used for comparative purposes. Many minorities differ from the majority Han in terms of their cultural, linguistic and even religious affiliations.

Our findings indicate that historically ethnic minorities experienced higher annual rates of population growth. These have been declining and more recently they are even slightly lower than the growth rate for the Han. Overall, the ethnic minorities are younger and experience higher levels of fertility and mortality. They are generally concentrated in certain areas, mostly around the borders of China. They rank much lower in terms of socio-economic indicators such as education and occupation and labour force participation. While there has been progress during the past decades, the benefits of China’s rapid economic development have not been enjoyed by most of the ethnic minorities to the same extent as the Han.

Focusing on the data of migrants’ religion, this paper provides research-based evidence to explain whether and to what extent such data could be reliable. The explanation is based on population census that also provides unique nation-wide data sources on ‘religious affiliation’. It particularly focuses on a group of migrants in the multiethnic and multicultural context of Australia whose religious affiliation was ‘Islam’ (that is, Muslim migrants) from a comparative perspective. The findings of this study show that while this particular group of migrants are affiliated to the same religion, they contribute overwhelmingly varying socio-demographic and economic characteristics on the basis of their ethnic backgrounds. According to the findings of the present analysis, this paper argues that if migrants belonging to the same category of religious affiliation are studied as a single group without considering their ethnic origins, this will lead to insufficient, incomplete, and misleading knowledge on migrants’ religion.

After a swift decline during the 1990s related to the collapse of the Soviet Union, fertility has been stagnating and/or increasing in all countries of Central Asia. So far, this issue has not been the subject of strong interest from demographers. In this study, I investigate different hypotheses contributing to understand better the recent changes in the region: data artifacts (improvement in vital registration (VR) system), population composition effect, and economic context. The comparison of fertility data from the VR with other estimates from other data sources and/or estimation methods gives confidence that the recent changes are real and that the data artifact hypothesis can be ruled out. The most plausible explanations are to be found in the population composition effect and the economic context. As fertility patterns differ between ethnic groups, the out-migration of large portions of specific ethnic groups influences ultimately the course of fertility at the country level. Further, the effect of the diverse economic fortunes among Central Asian countries is as well considered as a possible factor contributing to the recent fertility trends in the region.

The immigrant heterogeneous society of northern British Honduras faced health-disease processes depending on their membership of a social group (intimate culture, here). To analyze this, I compare social groups built by intimate cultures (Lomnitz-Adler, 1995), analyzing their causes of deaths between 1885 and 1934 from civil registration District of Corozal and Orange Walk. With this information were made crosstabs and X2 statistics to verify the differences in causes of death among intimate cultures. I expect found differential access to health services and living conditions in this British colony due to differences by class and ethnicity in which residents were involved

Nigeria accounts for 10% of world’s maternal deaths. Meanwhile 62% of women deliver at home and 36% receive postnatal care. The poor maternal health situation has been linked to ethnic origin, but little is known about the role of ethnic diversity and homogeneity in the use of maternal health care services. We assessed the role of diversity and homogeneity in the utilization of delivery and postnatal care using a representative sample of 17542 women aged 15-49 years from the 2008 Nigeria Demographic and Health Survey. Multivariate logistic regression was employed to examine the association between ethnicity and the use of delivery and postnatal care. Preliminary results indicated that women who lived in communities with high proportion of women from different ethnic groups were less likely to deliver in a heath facility compared to those who lived in homogenous communities. Living in high ethnic diversity communities is significantly associated with increased odds of receiving postnatal care. Results demonstrated that ethnic diversity plays important role in understanding the differences in the utilization of maternal health care services. Findings suggest that interventions aimed at improving the use of maternal health care should take into account the concentration of ethnic groups in the community.

Despite the spread of modern familial values and norms and the rapid pace of modernization in Iran, kinship marriages remain a common practice among some ethnic groups, including Turk and Kurd. This study is informed by modernization and development idealism theories to examine factors associated with the practice and attitude of Kurdish and Turkish women to consanguineous marriage, utilizing data from a representative sample of 768 ever-married women residing in Uromiah city in Iran. The results indicated that consanguineous marriage was more prevalent among Kurds rather than Turks, and Kurdish rather than Turkish women held more positive orientations to consanguineous. Multivariate results showed that being a Kurd than a Turk was strongly associated with the likelihood of practicing kinship marriage and having positive attitudes to consanguineous marriage, while the levels of modernization and development idealism showed no or weak association. The results suggest that ethnic belonging can reinforce consanguineous marriage regardless of being modernized or holding modern development ideals.

In 2000 the Government of Indonesia made a political breakthrough by allowing its statistical agency to collect and publish data on ethnicity in its population census. The data in the census is the first statistics on ethnicity in Indonesia since its independence in 1945. Earlier statistics was collected during the colonial time in 1930. The 2010 population census continued the initiative, collecting and publishing the statistics on ethnicity. We utilize the coded raw data of 2010 population census to produce and analyse the first statistics on ethnic composition in Indonesia in 2010. We evaluate its changes during 2000-2010. We also calculate and discuss the first statistics on the religion and language of each of the ethnic groups. Because of space limitation, we focus on the fifteen largest ethnic groups, covering 84.89 percent of total Indonesian citizens in Indonesia in 2010. We utilize our New Classification of ethnic groups in Indonesia, which is a useful guide for anybody who wants to study Indonesia’s ethnicity using the 2010 population census.