Spatial Patterns and Determinants of Demographic Outcomes

Using geographically weighted regression (GWR), a recent study by Shoff and colleagues (2012) investigated the place-specific risk factors for prenatal care utilization in the U.S. and found that most of the relationships between late or not prenatal care and its determinants are spatially heterogeneous. However, the GWR approach may be subject to the confounding effect of spatial homogeneity. The goal of this study is to address this concern by including both spatial homogeneity and heterogeneity into the analysis. Specifically, we employ an analytic framework where a spatial lagged (SL) effect of the dependent variable is incorporated into the GWR model, which is called GWR-SL. Using this innovative framework, we found preliminary evidence to argue that spatial homogeneity may play a role in the study by Shoff et al. (2012). The GWR-SL approach allows us to gain a better understanding of prenatal care utilization in US counties, and improves on conventional approaches (e.g., OLS and spatial lag models). The new findings help us to better estimate how the predictors are associated with prenatal care utilization across space, and determine the counties whose neighboring prenatal care utilization matters.

Early marriage has been identified in Southeast Asia as a determinant of lower health and social indicators than girls that marry at an older age. Early marriage can affect educational, social and economic opportunities, as well as the health status of the woman and her offspring. Bangladesh has one of the highest rates of child marriage in the world, and late marriage in Bangladesh is seen as a major pressure on families and social and cultural norms.
In Bangladesh, there have been many surveys focused on health and social indicators in Bangladesh. These surveys show differences in health indicators across Bangladesh. Eastern Bangladesh has some of the worst health indicators in the country and are worse than areas of western Bangladesh. However, eastern regions have a much higher mean age at marriage than other regions of Bangladesh. Based upon data from these surveys, early marriage is not directly related to poorer health outcomes across Bangladesh, and late or delayed marriage is not directly related to better health outcomes. This study will apply spatial regressions and spatial regime analysis, to understand the independent variables that factor into age at first marriage variation across districts and regions in Bangladesh.

The goal of Terra Populus (TerraPop) is to lower barriers to conducting interdisciplinary human-environment interactions research by making data with different formats from different scientific domains easily interoperable. TerraPop is developing organizational and technical infrastructure to integrate, preserve, and disseminate data describing population and environment over time. TerraPop will incorporate large international microdata and aggregate census datasets, along with land use, land cover, climate, and other environmental datasets. Currently, these data exist in a variety of data structures, have generally inadequate metadata, and have incompatible geographic identifiers. TerraPop is developing methods of integrating data from different domains and data structures based on spatio-temporal linkages among data contents. The new infrastructure will enable researchers to merge data from heterogeneous sources to study relationships between human behavior and the natural world. TerraPop will partner with data archives, data producers, and data users to create a sustainable international organization that will guarantee preservation and access over multiple decades. A beta version of the TerraPop data access system will be available in spring 2013, and initial public release is planned by the end of 2013.

Within three decades Algerian fertility dramatically fell, from 8 children per woman in the early 1970s to 2.2 in the late 1990s, before climbing up after 2000. As usual, the decline started in cities. But it could not have been so rapid at the national level without diffusing in rural world quickly. We check here such assumption by analysing data available at regional and local levels. Local data are rare and hardly accessible, except those from the 1998 census now published at the “commune” level. A special treatment of 1987 census data for the central part of the country allowed us to analyse changes occurred in the last period of sharp decline at the commune level. It is also very interesting to look at the geographical changes in age at marriage, the rise of which was the first mean of fertility reduction, and to discuss the relation between the two behaviour changes.