Kinship Demography and the Demography of BereavementEscuela ALAP 2026, Puntarenas, Costa Rica, 24-25 August 2026
Under the leadership of the IUSSP Panel on Kinship Structures, Dynamics and Inequalities, a two-day training school on kinship demography was held at the Puntarenas campus of the University of Costa Rica on 24–25 August 2026, organised as part of the Escuela ALAP 2026. The school brought together fifteen participants spanning the full range of academic roles, from graduate students to professors, from universities and research institutions across Latin America.
The school pursued two aims. The first was to introduce participants to kinship models: demographic methods that make it possible to estimate, from a population’s birth and death rates, how many living relatives a person can expect to have at each age, and how those family networks change as populations age. These methods allow researchers to describe family structures for countries and historical periods where no survey or register data on kinship exist.
The second aim, and the school’s principal contribution, was to present new teaching material on the demography of bereavement, presented for the first time. Bereavement is ordinarily understood as an individual experience, but it can also be measured as a property of whole populations: how many people lose a close relative in a given year, and how many are left grieving for each death that occurs. Participants were introduced to two complementary ways of producing such estimates—mathematically and through computer simulation. The approach was illustrated with an application to the Colombian armed conflict, showing how the toll of violent mortality extends well beyond those who die.
The school was taught by Liliana Calderón (Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, MPIDR), Enrique Acosta (Centre d'Estudis Demogràfics), and Diego Alburez-Gutierrez (MPIDR).
All teaching material is freely available in Spanish and fully reproducible.
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