Formal demography, innovative methodologies, and their applications

In India,where marriage is nearly universal and since considerable proportions of marriages in India take place at ages close to the start of the reproductive age of women, raising the age at marriage is seen as one of the relatively few important policy interventions'beyond family planning' that might affect fertility.Though in India law abides people for marriage registration but still there is poor registration of such data and not much effort are also being made in this regard.In India there is complete lack of data on the number of marriages and hence no attempt was made to study the marriage rates which reflect the frequencies with which marriages are taking place in the population.This study attempts have been made to find out the marriage rates in India,so as to understand the level and pattern of frequency of marriages in India and across different states under different sections of the population.This study uses the second and third rounds of District Level Household Survey of India for innovative estimation of various marriage rates and also to find out risk factors related to marriages below legal age at marriage. This rates on marriage can use by the demographers for construction of nuptiality tables.

Demographic forecasting models simulate the likely future development of a population with assumptions in mortality, fertility, and migration.
If demographic behavior is heterogeneous in a population,
projection accuracy can be affected substantially.
To overcome this problem,
we propose a new general framework that can be used to disaggregate heterogeneous populations in as many homogeneous subpopulations as needed that can then be projected with separate assumptions in mortality and fertility.
The advantage of our general framework is that subpopulations cannot only be constructed with typical characteristics like age and sex,
but also with other characteristics like country of origin or level of education.
We apply this general framework in projections for Germany up to 2050 in order to show the impact of expected demographic heterogeneity on projection outcome.
In the first projection, we use the variables age and sex to construct subpopulations,
and in the second and third projection, we add the variables migration status and reason to migrate.
As expected, our preliminary results indicate that projection error accumulates over time,
and that it is higher for the first than for the second projection.
We also discuss how this general framework can be easily applied to conduct multiregional projections.

Rectangularization - the development of an increasingly rectangular
shape of the survival curve - has been theoretically predicted and
empirically noted among humans in nearly all low mortality countries in
the last decade. Explanations that account for rectangularization and
test their applicability to empirical data, however, remain limited. We
propose a new approach that distinguishes between two different kinds of
rectangularization, inner and outer rectangularization. Inner
rectangularization refers to the rectangular shape produced by the
mortality schedule, whereas outer refers to the used maximum living
potential determined by the highest attained age. This allows us to
implement the Maximized Inner Rectangle Approach (MIRA), which
determines the biggest rectangle under the survival curve, thereby
enabling a decomposition of the area below and above the survival curve.
The empirical application of our models reveals that rectangular
movement is not a new development, and has been a visible feature of the
survival curve since the earliest survival data we have access to.
Furthermore, our approach provides empirical evidence against
compression as a mechanism underlying rectangularization, and supports
the explanation that rectangularization is the result of a premature
mortality decline.

In the developing world it is expected that half of the future population growth will be caused by its young population age-structure, an aspect of population dynamics that is referred to as population momentum. Less discussed is the amount of population decline that will be observed in the future in developed countries with its “negative momentum” caused by its old population age-structure. Population momentum summarizes the relation between a population age-structure and the age-structure resulting from its equivalent population under stability (growth equal to zero). Since mortality and fertility change permanently also the population momentum corresponding for each time is different. However, little work has been done to summarize time trends of this measure. We study the trends in time of population momentum for countries with available period and cohort, fertility and mortality information. Our preliminary results show clear distinction between three periods in population momentum, distinguish by their levels of fertility and mortality: high-high, high-low, and low-low, for fertility and mortality respectively. In recent years most developed countries have entered into the low-low stage and more than a decade of negative population momentum.

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?

This paper aims to discuss the implementation of contemporary ICT application , called short messaging service (SMS), in supporting the monitoring process during the field enumeration period. This technology was remarkable useful, effective and cheap to overcome the field monitoring in Timor Leste which has geographical and infrastructure barriers. Best practices in the management along with field monitoring using SMS reports were believed to have positive impact on the result of the 2010 Timor Leste population and Housing Census. The differences of total population in Timor Leste between preliminary results (reported on October 2010, one month after field works completed) and final results (reported on April 2011) is only 173 persons out of 1.07 million.

Keywords: population and housing census, ICT implementation, SMS reporting.

New general event-centered demographic concepts are introduced that provide a generalization of reduced events and event-history methods. They provide a general way of defining indicators where every event contributes to the phenomenon of interest. The basic concepts that apply to all event-centered measures are defined, including the processes of reduction and aggregation. Reduction requires the precise location of an event in a Lexis space, and a reduction factor against which the event is measured up. Different reduction factors lead to different indicators. Aggregation defines summary measures of reduced events. Special attention is paid to birth cohort size as a reduction factor. The indicators are the result of concurrent phenomena like mortality, fertility and migration without requirinng their previous isolation. Exposure-based reduction factors lead to standard demographic indicators such as age-specific rates or the TFR. . Period and cohort examples of reduced birth and death measures are provided, such as the Birth Replacement Sum or the Death Cohort. All the concepts are defined at the event level, and can be estimated from vital registration microdata, aggregate data or survey microdata. The concepts are illustrated with examples of application, and are connected to alternative aggregate estimates and ratios.

During the past 10-15 years a number of papers have surfaced that propose new methods for projecting populations and fertility. Given the wide array of such projections, it appears that the time is right to step back and take stock of the ‘state of the art’ and to critically evaluate the relative contributions of each method. We will analyse these new methodologies and attempt to provide an objective evaluation of their contributions to improving the utility of population and fertility forecasting. In this vein, we critically evaluate at least nine new publications which have driven forward the frontiers of population forecasting using a set of objective criteria for evaluating fertility and population projections which we will design. The main criterion that we are proposing to judge whether a new fertility or population projection method is an improvement, is whether it utilizes research that has revealed a heretofore unknown or not well understood mechanism influencing a fertility status or trend, or a new mechanism influencing population change. The paper will conclude with an overview of the type of fertility and population projections needed or requested by different types of users and an evaluation of whether the supply meets the demand.

This paper applies a multivariate method to estimate different fertility measures in Iran. The method builds on discrete-time survival models to construct multidimensional life tables of parity progression. The basic dimensions of these life tables are age, parity, and duration in parity.
The application is to Iran’s 2006 Population and Housing Census, %2 sample data. The reconstruction of birth history method is used to build birth histories of women age 15-64. The application includes both period and cohort analyses. The period analysis pertains to four 5-year periods before the census. The cohort analysis pertains to different cohorts of women age 60-64, 55-59, 50-54, 45-49, 40-44, and 35-39.
The results of the analysis show that period total fertility rate declined more than 60 percent between first (1987-91) and last (2002-06) period from 4.2 to 1.6 children per woman. The cumulative fertility rate also declined about 50 percent from 5.7 to 2.8 between cohorts of women age 60-64 and 35-39. The multivariate analysis of the TFR and its components shows a two-stage fertility transition. First, the quantum of fertility declines as women limit childbearing at higher parity transitions and older ages. Then, the tempo of fertility changes as women postpone childbearing.

This paper presents the core methodological ideas, empirical assessments and applications of extended cohort-component approach (known as ProFamy model) to simultaneously project households, living arrangements and population age structure/sizes at sub-national level. Comparisons of projections from 1990 to 2000 using this approach with census counts in 2000 for each of the 50 states and DC show that 68.0, 17.0, 11.2, and 3.8 percent of absolute percent errors are <3.0%, 3.0-4.99%, 5.0-9.99% and 10.0%, respectively. Another analysis compares average forecast errors between extended cohort-component approach and still-widely-used classic headship-rate method, by projecting number-of-bedrooms-specific housing demands from 1990 to 2000 and then comparing with census counts in 2000 for each of the 50 states and DC. The results demonstrate that, as compared to extended cohort-component approach, headship-rate method produces substantially more serious forecast errors. Illustrative projections from 2000 to 2050 for each of the 50 states, DC, six counties of Southern-California, and Minneapolis-St. Paul Metropolitan Area are reported. Among many interesting outcomes of projections with medium, low and high bounds, the aging of American households over the next few decades across all states/areas is particularly striking. Finally, the