This book is based on detailed interviews with a group of Irish women who have experienced marital separation. It links the women's accounts with literature on the values and beliefs about marriage, women and family which were prevalent when they were growing up in Ireland in the 1950s and 1960s. The book chronicles their young adult years, the early stages of their marriages and the events and processes which led to their separations. It explores the women's emotional reactions at the time of separating, the types of support which they found beneficial and the personal, social and financial consequences of having separated. Although the book is written from a sociological perspective, the combination of theory and practical insights make it accessible to a wide variety of readers. It aims to generate discussion and deepen understanding of an area into which there has been minimal research in Ireland and which poses a range of important questions for future researchers, practitioners and policy-makers.

Low fertility, one of the critical issues in the contemporary world, will persist in the foreseeable future. That is arguably the principal conclusion of this book. Fundamental changes in social security and health care systems, taxation schemes, and migration policies, for instance, are inevitable, unless societies are able to institute effective measures and create favorable conditions for increasing fertility. Such are the unavoidable challenges facing European and other economically advanced countries.

The present study applies the cohort analysis approach to detailed data covering over half of the 20th century for populations of 35 countries. In distinction to most previous studies, that approach is put to use not only for elucidating past trends, but also to capture salient aspects of contemporary fertility patterns. And, beyond that, it is utilized to suggest possible near-term future trends in fertility behavior.

Many industrialized countries are facing large problems with their public pension systems in the 21st century. An unfavourable age distribution, with lower population shares in working ages and increasing shares and numbers of elderly persons in the future will lead, under current pension systems, to a drop in contributions and at the same time to sharply rising amounts of benefits paid. This book analyzes the impact of dynamics in age structure and marital status composition on future public pension expenditures in twelve industrialized countries. It shows that there is no demographic response to population ageing at the horizon 2030. Neither an increase in fertility nor an inflow of migrants can rejuvenate national populations, unless fertility and/or migration reach unrealistically high levels. Therefore, the overall conclusion of this book is that demographic variables are of limited help to relieve the burden of future public pension expenditures. Substantial reductions of the public pension burden have to be sought in socioeconomic measures, and not in adjusting demographic conditions. The book includes various demographic and pension scenarios for pension costs in the coming decades for Austria, Canada, the Czech and Slovak Republics, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, and Sweden. Not only old age pensions, but also disability and survivor pensions have been investigated. Variant projections were calculated for changes in demographic, labour force, and pension system variables. In addition, separate case studies for three countries deal with: a pension system in Austria in which benefits depend on the number children ever born; the impact of household dynamics on social security in the Netherlands, not just marriage and marriage dissolution; and with the consequences of economic growth for public pensions in Sweden.

Inverse Projection is a method for estimating accurate demographic indicators of a population where vital registration data are available, but population censuses are lacking or unreliable. The book offers an overview of the present state of methodological development in the field of inverse projection techniques. In the various chapters of the book, leading experts in demography and related fields review the method, discuss recent extensions, test performances, and stress differences of the various procedures. The book is intended for all scientists who are interested in the reconstruction of demographic scenarios in particular situations, with specific kinds of data, as well as for statisticians and mathematicians who are attracted by this fascinating field of application.

The Life Table covers various important issues in life table construction and use. G. Wunsch presents a non-technical overview of the life table in the first chapter. G. Calot and A. Franco then give a detailed account of the estimation of the probability of dying between two consecutive ages, taking migration and the distribution of population at risk into account. E. Valkovics compares various methods of decomposing the difference in life expectancies. J. Anson deals with the problem of finding suitable indicators summarising the age distribution of mortality. Two chapters, respectively by G. Caselli and by E. Tabeau, F. Willekens, and F. van Poppel, are devoted to age, period, and cohort effects in mortality. Three chapters then deal more specifically with mortality by cause of death. F. Mesle first discusses the problem of adequately registering these causes. A.E. Kunst, J.P. Mackenbach, H. Lautenbach, F.B. Oei, and F. Bijlsma examine the gains in life expectancy obtained by eliminating major causes of death, taking into account competing causes of death. J. Duchene presents an introduction to multi-state morbidity-mortality models by cause. The competing risks model is thoroughly analysed by M. Mouchart and J.M. Rolin. E. Camboid and J.M. Robine show how the life table model can be extended for the assessment of the global health level of a population. The book ends with a concluding chapter by Jon Anson, which puts life table analysis in a broader sociological perspective.

Information on future mortality trends is essential for population forecasts, public health policy, actuarial studies, and many other purposes. Realising the importance of such needs, this volume contains contributions to the theory and practice of forecasting mortality in the relatively favourable circumstances in developed countries of Western Europe. In this context techniques from mathematical statistics and econometrics can provide useful descriptions of past mortality. The naive forecast obtained by extrapolating a fitted model may give as good a forecast as any but forecasting by extrapolation requires careful justification since it assumes the prolongation of historical conditions. On the other hand, whilst it is generally accepted that scientific and other advances will continue to impact on mortality, perhaps dramatically so, it is impossible to quantify more than the outline of future consequences with a strong degree of confidence. The decision to modify an extrapolation of a model fitted to historical data (or conversely choosing not to modify it) in order to obtain a forecast is therefore strongly influenced by subjective and judgmental elements, with the quality of the latter dependent on demographic, epidemiological and indeed perhaps more general considerations. The thread running through the book reflects therefore the necessity of integrating demographic, epidemiological, and statistical factors to obtain an improvement in the prediction of mortality.

How should life expectancy be calculated? More generally, how should life - bles be estimated? Since John Graunt's pioneering contribution, read before theRoyalSocietyofLondonat6p. m. onthe27thofFebruary1661, demog- phers have developed better and better methods. Some concerns were raised, including concerns about how to deal with heterogeneous populations p- lished in an article inDemography in 1979 that I wrote with Kenneth Manton and Eric Stallard. Yet, a few years ago nearly all demographers believed that as long as the underlying population and death counts were accurate, then lifetables could be reliably estimated. John Bongaarts and Gri? Feeney launched a revolutionary assault on this dogma. Two key contributions by them are reprinted in Part I of this mo- graph. Some very good demographers agreed, as least in part, with B- gaarts' and Feeney's radical argument that when death rates are changing, then tempo e?ects distort conventional calculations of life expectancy. Other very good demographers disagreed. So John Bongaarts and I brought some leading demographers together in a research meeting, co-sponsored by the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research and the Population Co- cil and held in New York City on November 18 and 19, 2004. Many of the papers discussed at the workshop, generally after considerable revision, were published in Demographic Research in 2005 and 2006. Nine of these articles, in some cases somewhat revised, are published in this monograph: they are the ?rst seven chapters in Part II and the two chapters in Part III.

The purpose of this book is to examine the etiology of cancer in large human populations using mathematical models developed from an inter-disciplinary perspective of the population epidemiological, biodemographic, genetic and physiological basis of the mechanisms of cancer initiation and progression. In addition an investigation of how the basic mechanism of tumor initiation relates to general processes of senescence and to other major chronic diseases (e.g., heart disease and stroke) will be conducted.

The thesis of this book is that there are one set of equations that can define any trip between an origin and destination. The idea originally came from work that I did when applying the hydrodynamic analogy to study congested traffic flows in 1981. However, I was disappointed to find out that much of the mathematical work had already been done decades earlier. When I looked for a new application, I realised that shopping centre demand could be like a longitudinal wave, governed by centre opening and closing times. Further, a solution to the differential equation was the gravity model and this suggested that time was somehow part of distance decay. This was published in 1985 and represented a different approach to spatial interaction modelling. The next step was to translate the abstract theory into something that could be tested empirically. To this end, I am grateful to my Ph. D supervisor, Professor Barry Garner who taught me that it is not sufficient just to have a theoretical model. This book is an outcome of this on-going quest to look at how the evolution of the model performs against real world data. This is a far more difficult process than numerical simulations, but the results have been more valuable to policy formulation, and closer to what I think is spatial science. The testing and application of the model required the compilation of shopping centre surveys and an Internet data set.

This book is the reference on indirect sampling and the generalised weight share method. It reviews the different developments done by the author on these subjects. In addition to the underlying theory, the book presents different possible applications that drive its interest. The reader will find in this book the answer to questions that come, inevitably, when working in a context of indirect sampling.

This book assembles researchers in demography, statistics, political science, sociology, anthropology, history, geography, economics and law to offer fresh insight on the demographic causes and consequences of armed conflict. Cause studies consider migration, ethnicity, population growth and youth bulges. Studies on consequences of conflict include mortality from conflict, casualty estimation for prosecution of war crimes, and case studies of conflicts in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Cambodia, Kenya, Mali, Rwanda, Sudan and Uganda.

Bernard (Barney) Berelson had a major influence in the application of social science concepts and methods to population policy during the period from 1962 to 1980. This was the period when concern with population problems spread from a relatively small group of scholars and population activists to a much larger, diverse, international group of political and intellectual leaders and to the general public as well. There was an exponential growth in the number of scholars and service personnel in vari ous population and family specialities in this period. Barney came into the field with his appointment as Director of the Com munication Research Program of The Population Council in 1962. He had no previous training or experience in demography. Frank Notestein, Presi dent of The Population Council at the time, had the wisdom to appreciate the value and relevance of Barney's itTIpressive background in communica tion research and other social science areas, as well as his creative mind and leadership qualities. His influence on the Council's rapidly expanding program was so immediate and impressive that within a year, he was named Vice President. When Frank Notestein retired in 1968, Barney became President, a post he held for 6 very productive years."

Seasonal fluctuations in mortality are a persistent phenomenon, but variations from culture to culture pose fascinating questions. This book investigates whether sociodemographic and socioeconomic factors play a role as important for seasonal mortality as they do for mortality in general. Using modern statistical methods, the book shows, for example, that in the United States the fluctuations between winter and summer mortality are smaller the more years someone has spent in school.

Here is a comprehensive and hugely important treatment of the topic of gender and demographic behaviour. It covers a lot of ground, from the age at first intercourse, through union formation and dissolution, to subjects such as fertility, migration, and ageing. It also examines in detail excess male mortality and provides a comparison of gender-specific behaviour and its determinants. It reports new findings of empirical research, mostly based on data from a number of European countries, making good use of Family and Fertility surveys and other international databases.

This book outlines Bayesian statistical analysis in great detail, from the development of a model through the process of making statistical inference. The key feature of this book is that it covers models that are most commonly used in social science research - including the linear regression model, generalized linear models, hierarchical models, and multivariate regression models - and it thoroughly develops each real-data example in painstaking detail.

In this book, distinguished demographers consider whether recent changes in women's roles are the cause of such changes in family life as rising divorce rates and declining marriage rates, increases in out-of-wedlock childbearing, and a growing disconnection between the lives of men and children. The discussion covers over twenty countries, including the USA, the countries of western Europe, and Japan.

The anti-causal prophecies of last century have been disproved. Causality is neither a relic of a bygone nor another fetish of modern science; it still occupies a large part of the current debate in philosophy and the sciences.

This investigation into causal modelling presents the rationale of causality, i.e. the notion that guides causal reasoning in causal modelling. It is argued that causal models are regimented by a rationale of variation, nor of regularity neither invariance, thus breaking down the dominant Human paradigm. The notion of variation is shown to be embedded in the scheme of reasoning behind various causal models: e.g. Rubin s model, contingency tables, and multilevel analysis. It is also shown to be latent yet fundamental in many philosophical accounts. Moreover, it has significant consequences for methodological issues: the warranty of the causal interpretation of causal models, the levels of causation, the characterisation of mechanisms, and the interpretation of probability.

This book offers a novel philosophical and methodological approach to causal reasoning in causal modelling and provides the reader with the tools to be up to date about various issues causality rises in social science.

"Dr. Federica Russo's book is a very valuable addition to a small number of relevant publications on causality and causal modelling in the social sciences viewed from a philosophical approach." (Prof. Guillaume Wunsch, Institute of Demography, University of Louvain, Belgium)"

The aim of Diversity in Family Formation is to examine changes in the start of the family formation process. Rather than giving a rough overview of demographic changes in many countries, a comparison of differences in changes in family formation and fertility behaviour between Belgium and The Netherlands is interesting for various reasons. First, even though the economic and cultural differences between these countries are relatively small there is one important difference: Belgium is predominantly Catholic, whereas The Netherlands has about equal proportions of Catholics and Protestants. Second, if the Second Demographic Transition implies that there is one common pattern of change in different European countries and that differences across countries are due to the fact that countries are in a different stage of the transition process, and if it is assumed that the transition process started earlier in Protestant countries than in Catholic countries, one would expect The Netherlands to be in a further stage of the transition process than Belgium. Thus an in-depth comparison of changes in family formation and fertility behaviour between both countries may give us more insight in the question of whether there is one common transition process. The comparison of fertility and family survey-data in both countries brings us to the core question of whether there is one common explanation for differences between countries in various types of fertility and family behaviour under consideration, namely fertility regulation, the choice of living arrangement after leaving the parental home, and the labour force participation of mothers.

This volume aims to describe the similarities and differences in the timing and kind of transition among the post-war cohorts in Austria, Britain, Flanders (Belgium), France, Germany, Italy, The Netherlands, Norway, Poland, and Spain. Its second aim is to bring together the results of individual-level studies from these ten European countries, analyzing the impact of selected determinants on the transition to adulthood.

Social differences in health and mortality constitute a persistent finding in epidemiological, demographic, and sociological research. It is a topic that is much discussed in the current political debate and it is among the most urgent public health issues. However, we still do not know whether socioeconomic mortality differences increase or decrease with age.

This book provides a comprehensive, critical discussion of all aspects involved in the relationship between socioeconomic status, health and mortality. It synthesizes the sociological theory of social inequality and an empirical study of mortality differences that has been conducted by the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (Rostock, Germany). This study is the most comprehensive analysis of socioeconomic mortality differences in the literature, both in terms of quantity and quality of data, and in terms of the statistical method used: that of event-history modeling.

This stimulating, carefully-researched book on The Late Life Legacy of Very Early Life by Dr. Gabriele Doblhammer is the second volume of a new series of Demographic Research Monographs published by Springer Verlag. The topic of the book is fascinating. Is a person's lifespan influ enced by health and nutrition in-utero and shortly after birth? If so, why? The answers uncovered by the diligence, demographic and statistical ex pertise, and probing intelligence of the author are surprising but convinc ing. To pry open the mystery of the lingering impact of very early life, Dr. Doblharnmer focuses on month of birth. It turns out that people born in some months live substantially longer on average than people born in other months, not because of astrological forces but for reasons of health and nutrition. Dr. Doblhammer was educated in statistics and demography and earlier this year was the first person ever to receive the "Habilitation" de gree, the recognition given in the German-speaking world to proven scho lars who are qualified to become professors, in Demography. This book, which is evidence that she fully deserves this award, will not only provide important new fmdings about the legacy of early life but will also serve as a comprehensive foundation of knowledge on which future scholars can build. The series of Demographic Research Monographs is under the editorial supervision of the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research. Prof. James W. Vaupel, Founding Director of the Institute, is Editor-in-Chief."

The authors of this work use a novel strategy that combines record linkage and demographic/statistical analysis to produce an internally consistent and robust set of estimates of the African-American population during the period 1930-1990. They interpret the record that emerges, with special reference to longevity trends and differentials. This work is for demographers, sociologists and students of ethnic studies.

New perspectives in interpreting contemporary family and reproductive - haviour of Mediterranean Europe 1. THE NEW GEOGRAPHY OF FERTILITY AND THE FAMILY IN EUROPE The countries of southern Europe have begun to reduce conjugal fertility at a later date compared to most other nations in the west. This has been - plained by means of the category of delay: the backwardness of the pr- esses of accumulation and economic development being seen as the cause of the maintaining of the reproductive models of the past. Moreover, the inf- ence of the Catholic Church in Italy, Spain and Portugal is supposed to have delayed the processes of secularisation, rendering difficult the changes in mentality necessary for assuming modern patterns of reproductive behaviour not only for fertility, but also for the variables which are strictly linked to it, such as sexuality, contraception and abortion (Livi Bacci, 1977; Lesthaeghe and Wilson, 1986). 1. 1. The trends of very low fertility Now the panorama is very different. Since the mid-seventies, southern Europe has been washed by the tide of a lowest-low fertility (i. e. , TFR under 1. 5 for several a prolonged period, Billari et al. , 2003), which in some areas 1 has reached and maintained scarcely imaginable levels for years on end. Conversely, other areas of Europe, where fertility started to fall many d- ades earlier than in the regions of the sourth, have recovered or maintained considerably higher levels of fertility, often close to replacement level.

The central aim of many studies in population research and demography is to explain cause-effect relationships among variables or events. For decades, population scientists have concentrated their efforts on estimating the 'causes of effects' by applying standard cross-sectional and dynamic regression techniques, with regression coefficients routinely being understood as estimates of causal effects. The standard approach to infer the 'effects of causes' in natural sciences and in psychology is to conduct randomized experiments. In population studies, experimental designs are generally infeasible.

In population studies, most research is based on non-experimental designs (observational or survey designs) and rarely on quasi experiments or natural experiments. Using non-experimental designs to infer causal relationships-i.e. relationships that can ultimately inform policies or interventions-is a complex undertaking. Specifically, treatment effects can be inferred from non-experimental data with a counterfactual approach. In this counterfactual perspective, causal effects are defined as the difference between the potential outcome irrespective of whether or not an individual had received a certain treatment (or experienced a certain cause). The counterfactual approach to estimate effects of causes from quasi-experimental data or from observational studies was first proposed by Rubin in 1974 and further developed by James Heckman and others.

This book presents both theoretical contributions and empirical applications of the counterfactual approach to causal inference.

Since the onset of modernisation the world population has doubled several times and will soon reach 6 billion of people. The annual rate of increase in the world population is approximately 90 million people. This is the largest absolute level of population growth ever recorded. According to the most recent population projections of the United Nations, the world population will probably double again before stabilising at a stationary level. Ninety percent of the present and future population growth is accounted for by developing countries. The fast increase in the size of the population in many developing countries is a serious obstacle to their attempts to overcome their backwardness, make a substantial improvement to their quality of life, and achieve a sustainable way of exploiting their renewable and non-renewable resources. At the same time, non-sustainable consumption and production patterns in the industrial countries and among wealthy citizens in developing countries, place additional burdens on the planet's natural resources and ecosystems. With a view of considering these problems and elaborating policy guidelines, the United Nations staged its International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) in Cairo, Egypt, September 5-13, 1994. This monograph deals with the background to the ICPD, its preparation, proceedings, and contents. It also evaluates its results and recommendations by comparing the ICPD Action Programme with the current scientific literature. The ICPD dealt with the key issues concerning the interrelations between population, development and environment, and their causes, and was not limited to marginal issues such as abortion, promiscuity and homosexuality as was the impression given in the media as a result of the way these questions were distorted by the action of religious fundamentalists. The ICPD Action Programme forms an impressive charter with a broad range of relevant policy recommendations. Nevertheless, compared to most of the current scientific literature, the ICPD seems to underestimate the seriousness and urgency of the issues at stake.