Publicaciones por tema

Grandparents are a key source of care and support in South Asia, where formal welfare systems remain limited. Yet we know little about how many grandparents are alive for each grandchild, and how their age, sex, and educational compositions are changing as populations age and access to education improves. This study fills this gap by using demographic kinship models with national projections of fertility, mortality, and education to estimate the number and characteristics of living grandparents from 2020 to 2100 in eight South Asian countries. We show how demographic change is reshaping grandparenthood in uneven ways across the region. In 2020-2024, more than half of grandparents in Nepal and Pakistan had no education, compared with roughly one-fifth in Sri Lanka. By 2080, the share of grandparents with post-secondary education rises to nearly 20% in Nepal and over 30% in Sri Lanka and Iran, while progress remains slower in Bhutan and the Maldives. Across all countries, grandchildren have the most living grandparents early in life. This number declines with age, but most grandparents who remain alive tend to have a higher level of education. Sex-specific differences persist: grandmothers outnumber grandfathers at all ages due to sex differences in survival. These results indicate that future grandchildren in South Asia will grow up with more highly educated grandparents. Understanding these shifts is essential for anticipating how family support systems may evolve in a region where grandparents remain a central pillar of care.

The present study identifies and compares typical classes of relationship qualities in the nuclear and extended family ties of younger adults across nine European countries (Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, the United Kingdom, as well as the Nordic countries Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden). We used KINMATRIX data that were collected online in 2022-23 from an ego-centric perspective of 7,375 respondents aged 25–35. Employing latent class analysis and multinomial logistic regression models, we identified five distinct types of relationship qualities, labelled as ‘tight-knit’, ‘connected-but-autonomous’, ‘disharmonious-but-supportive’, ‘intimate-but-distant’, and ‘detached’. The prevalence of these relationship types varied across the family system, showing a clear gradient from tight-knit relations being most prevalent in the nuclear family to distant-extended relations being dominated by detachment. This resulted in a high overall proportion of relatively ‘weak’ relationships within young adults’ family networks. The distribution of classes across countries confirmed the existence of a North-South gradient of increasingly close nuclear and extended family ties in Europe: ‘Weaker’ relationships were more (and ‘stronger’ ties less) common in the Nordic countries, compared to an ‘intermediate’ cluster of countries consisting of the Netherlands, Germany, Poland, as well as the United Kingdom, and – especially – compared to Italy. Our study demonstrates the applicability of common typologies of relationship qualities to assess kin relations beyond the nuclear family and it highlights the relevance of accounting for extended kin relations across a range of European countries.

India’s ageing population relies heavily on kin, but conventional ageing measures do not capture older adults’ kin networks. We use demographic kinship models to estimate biological and selected affinal kin for a woman aged 65 in 17 Indian states covering 92% of the population, for rural and urban areas, from 1950 to 2100. We find between- and within-state inequalities in kin networks, similar to cross-country differences in South Asia. Kin networks become smaller and older, and working-age kin per older person (support ratio) declines faster than total kin. States reach low kin support ratios decades apart. The support ratio in urban Kerala is expected to fall below one by 2035, but Madhya Pradesh does not reach this level until 2050. Urban Madhya Pradesh is expected to have about 22 kin per woman in 2080, similar to urban Kerala in 2026. However, Madhya Pradesh is projected to have a support ratio of 0.64 in 2080, compared with 1.21 in Kerala in 2020. A male-biased sex ratio at birth associated with son preference has created a deficit in working-age daughters, reaching 10% in Punjab and Haryana around 2040 despite an assumed SRB of 1.05 after 2026. Yet having more sons than daughters does not translate proportionately into more daughters-in-law, traditionally expected to provide care. Our data show 0.6-0.7 daughters-in-law per son in urban Punjab and Kerala. These changes reshape the demographic basis of family support and highlight the need to strengthen formal care systems and redistribute support equitably across kin and genders.

One in four young mothers in Latin America raises her children without a partner, yet more than two-thirds do so within extended households, typically with their own parents. Despite the social implications of single-parent families, it remains unclear to what extent the prevalence and living arrangements of single mothers have evolved over recent decades or how they vary by education and partnership status. Using Integrated Public Use of Microdata Series (IPUMS) census microdata from 17 countries (1963–2020), we show that the share of single mothers has increased over time and across all educational groups. Most continue to live in extended family households, with coresidence with parents becoming increasingly common. Living arrangements of single mothers are strongly stratified: highly educated single mothers are the most likely to live with their parents, while those with lower education and who have ever been in a union more frequently live in nuclear households. These findings highlight the central, yet socially unequal, role of extended family support in the lives of single mothers in Latin America.

This study investigates the role of kin in shaping migration behavior, focusing on how the migration history of an individual’s parents, their own migration experience, and the presence of household members are associated with the individual’s likelihood and frequency of internal migration. Utilizing the Historical Sample of the Netherlands, which provides comprehensive migration histories of individuals from 1850 to 1940 and detailed information on the household composition at each address, we analyze internal migrations throughout the life course for multiple generations. Our findings suggest that individuals with at least one parent who had a migration background − defined as having migrated within the Netherlands − were more likely to move internally themselves, indicating the intergenerational transmission of migration behavior. Having migrated together with one’s parents earlier in life was also associated with a higher likelihood of migrating later on. Parents’ migration histories and individuals’ own migration experience with their parents were associated with a higher frequency of internal migrations made without parents. Finally, living with a spouse, at least one parent, or extended kin was associated with a lower likelihood of migrating. This work contributes to our understanding of migration patterns from a historical perspective, highlighting the long-term role of family networks and family migration experiences on individuals’ migration behavior.

Disability is usually framed as an individual condition, yet its associated consequences may extend through kinship networks. Despite this, the population reach of disability through kin remains unknown. We use demographic kinship matrix models combining fertility and mortality schedules with disability prevalence, to estimate population exposure to disability through grandparents, parents, siblings, children, and grandchildren across ages in Europe in 2021. We quantify exposure using three complementary measures: the probability of having at least one kin with disability, the population-level number of individuals exposed, and the proportion of kin with disability. Our results show that exposure is both widespread and substantial: across all ages and kin types, 70% of women in Europe, corresponding to about 160 million women, have at least one close kin with disability. In childhood and early adulthood, more than half to three-quarters of European women have at least one grandparent with disability, with the age-specific number of exposed women peaking at about 1.5 million; in midlife, about one-third to nearly one-half have at least one parent with disability, with the population-level exposure peaking at about 1.4 million women. Throughout much of women’s lives, between 20% and 40% of their close kin have disability. These findings show that disability is not only an individual experience but also a relational exposure amplified by kinship structures. Exposure to kin disability constitutes a hidden source of inequality that accumulates over the life course and intersects with gender and socioeconomic inequalities.

Queer family demography largely centers the nuclear family, with limited attention to extended kin. We provide a more comprehensive picture of queer kinship in the United States, specifically aunts/uncles, cousins, siblings, niblings, children, and grandchildren. Combining demographic kinship modeling techniques with survey data that directly identifies sexual minorities, we estimate both the individual-level number of queer kin and the population-level share with at least one queer kin, focusing on age, sex, and cohort dynamics. Findings indicate the number and composition of queer kin are shaped jointly by queer identification patterns, population and kinship network age and sex structures, and past demographic rates that determined kinship network size. We find substantial cohort differences: younger cohorts have more queer horizontal kin whereas older cohorts have more queer descendants. A majority of U.S. residents has one or more queer kin, driven by (bisexual) extended kin. Beyond providing estimates in a context where no comparable data exist, this study advances a queer kinship demography that situates queer people as members of extended family networks. This study offers a mechanism linking exposure to queer people to demographic trends, with implications for broader acceptance of sexual minorities.

Understanding the population-level distribution of parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents is increasingly important as fertility declines and kin networks thin. However, standard kinship demography tools do not easily capture these distributions when vertical kin are shared across individuals. We introduce a simple approximation to estimate age-specific proportions of women who are childless, mothers, grandmothers, and great-grandmothers from period fertility and mortality schedules. The approach relies on conditional first-order fertility hazards combined with standard age-specific fertility and survival rates, assuming a time-invariant regime and an age-specific distribution of parity. We illustrate the method using Argentine census data and vital statistics, and assess its performance by comparison with a demographic microsimulation. Results show pronounced declines over time in the prevalence of higher-order generational roles, alongside strong subnational heterogeneity. These findings demonstrate how declining fertility reshapes vertical kin availability and provide a tractable tool for studying kinlessness and intergenerational support in population ageing contexts. A key Further development can formally account for heterogeneity across multiple dimensions.

Individuals are embedded in kinship networks that frequently extend across national borders. The emergence of international families, in which relatives are geographically dispersed, is often seen as a contemporary phenomenon driven by globalization. However, a cross-national historical perspective on international families is lacking. In this paper, we use the online genealogical database FamiLinx to investigate the dispersion of international families across countries and over time. We find a high degree of international geographical dispersion in historical family networks between 1700 and 1900 in Europe and the United States. The percentage of individuals with descendants living abroad was higher in Europe, while the percentage of individuals with ancestors living abroad was higher in the US. In most of the analyzed European countries, we observe an increasing likelihood of individuals having at least one relative living abroad that peaked at around 1850, with the proportion of children living abroad growing rapidly over time. Our findings provide valuable insights into how historical migrations shaped kinship structures, improving our understanding of the historical dispersion of kin across countries and informing debates on the potential of kin to influence migration behaviors.

Much existing research in the demography of kinship focuses on quantifying the number and characteristics of living kin, such as age and sex. We know less about how individuals transition through different ‘generational placements’ over their life—for example, when and how long they are parents, children or experience overlap of multiple family generations. We use simulated micro-level data to project generational placement trajectories for life courses of the complete population of Norway born 1960 and 2000. Our microsimulations use age-specific fertility and mortality rates from 1846 to 2100. First, we benchmark projected trajectories for the 1960 cohort against observed trajectories from empirical register data from 1960 to 2019. Second, we project full life-course trajectories, from age 0 to 100, for the 1960 and 2000 cohorts. Results from sequence analysis show that generational placement trajectories efficiently capture individual-level heterogeneity in intergenerational kin availability and that results based on our simulated populations largely match those from empirical data. Over cohorts, typical generational placement trajectories will likely become more stable but “thinner”, with later (and shorter) demographic “(double) sandwiching” and increasingly frequent “fading family lines.” The analysis paves the path toward results on a global level and including projections for the future.

Objective: To develop a typology of relationship quality for nuclear and extended family relations of younger adults in the United States, accounting for variation across kinship types and racial/ethnic groups. Background: Existing typologies of family relationships primarily focus on nuclear ties, often neglecting relations with extended kin. Ties to extended kin are, however, central to many people's lives and may be particularly salient in certain racial/ethnic groups. Expanding current typologies to include nuclear and extended kin is therefore important for describing the diverse landscape of family relations. Method: We applied latent class analysis to data from the US sample of the KINMATRIX survey. Data of respondents aged 25 to 35 were collected online, capturing their perspectives on a wide array of nuclear and extended family members. The analytic sample comprised N = 3772 respondents and n = 65,270 dyadic relationships with their biological kin. Results: We identified five classes of relationships: tight-knit, connected-but-autonomous, disharmonious-but-supportive, intimate-but-distant, and detached. Across these classes, we found a pronounced gradient, whereby closeness declined and detachment increased with genealogical distance. Considering absolute kin numbers revealed a substantial “relational reserve” in extended family ties, particularly those characterized as connected-but-autonomous. These were especially relevant among Black respondents, who were less close to nuclear kin, but also less detached from extended kin. Conclusion: This study highlights the relevance of kin relations beyond the nuclear family and demonstrates the value of typological approaches assessing commonalities and differences—especially along racial/ethnic lines—in contemporary American families.

Objectives: Migration accelerates population aging in high-outmigration contexts. Older adults who remain in high-outmigration contexts are at higher risk of reduced support networks and increased caregiving burden, but prior work has not quantified how migration influences older adults’ kinship structures in such places. This study aims to estimate the kinship structures of older adults living in Puerto Rico and the presence of migrant kin. Methods: Data come from the United Nations World Population Prospects from 1950 to 2021. We created a 2-sex, multistate, time-variant kinship model to estimate how many and what type of family relationships we can expect for older adults in Puerto Rico and the presence of transnational kin. Results: Our models suggest that a 65+-year-old living in Puerto Rico will have, on average, 5.6 close biological family members in 2021: 2.8 adult children and 2.7 siblings. These numbers represent a decline since 2000 when 65+-year-olds had 6.7 such kin. Under 2021 demographic conditions, adults 65 years of age are expected to have 69% of their total female close kin and 71% of daughters residing in the United States. The expected number of transnational living kin is greater for 2021 compared with 2000. Discussion: Models suggest that future generations of older adults in Puerto Rico will have an increased presence of transnational family members. Thus, public health strategies must adapt to address the needs of transnational families in future generations of older adults.

Measures of kinship size are increasingly common in sociodemographic studies. The size and structure of older adults’ kinship networks can be ascertained via direct observation in a social survey or modeled using demographic techniques. Each approach has advantages and disadvantages, but whether the two provide comparable estimates of kinship size is an open question. In this research note, we answer this question using social survey data and demographic models to estimate the size of older adults’ kinship networks in 22 European countries. We find an impressively high association between the two approaches, with important variations by the kin type considered. We discuss the reasons for the divergence in the estimates and provide guidance for researchers interested in using either approach to quantify kinship size.

Intergenerational financial transfers are an important source of support during different life periods. Several demographic trends, especially increased longevity and postponed and declining fertility, influence the timing and level of these transfers. We know little, however, about the interactions between these trends and the accumulation and drawing down of household wealth over the life cycle. Here we show that the age distribution of parental mortality is the major factor influencing the age distribution of average bequest amounts among children. Using demographic microsimulations and survey estimates of net worth in the United States between 1989 and 2022, we find that average bequests are highest among the oldest parents and children, that children of white parents can expect 2 to 3 times higher bequests than children of black parents across the age distribution, and that, while mean amounts decreased across the board after the 2008 financial crisis, relative black-white differences increased.

Demographers have long attempted to project future changes in the size and composition of populations, but have ignored what these processes will mean for the size, composition, and age distribution of family networks. Kinship structures matter because family solidarity—a crucial source of informal care for millions of people around the world—is conditional on kin being alive. Here, we present innovative projections of biological kin for the 1950 to 2100 period and discuss what they imply for the availability of informal care. Overall, we project that the number of living kin for individuals will decline dramatically worldwide. While a 65-yo woman in 1950 could expect to have 41 living kin, a 65-yo woman in 2095 is projected to have just 25 [18.8 to 34.7] relatives (lower and upper 80% projection intervals). This represents a 38% [15 to 54] global decline. The composition of family networks is also expected to change, with the numbers of living grandparents and great-grandparents markedly increasing, and the numbers of cousins, nieces and nephews, and grandchildren declining. Family networks will age considerably, as we project a widening age gap between individuals and their kin due to lower and later fertility and longer lifespans. In Italy, for example, the average age of a grandmother of a 35-yo woman is expected to increase from 77.9 y in 1950 to 87.7 y [87.1 to 88.5] in 2095. The projected changes in kin supply will put pressure on the already stretched institutional systems of social support, as more individuals age with smaller and older family networks.

Kinship relations play a crucial role in structuring populations and shaping individual outcomes. Differences in kinship among individuals, cohorts, and subpopulations are one important aspect of these structures. Demography and related disciplines have proposed sophisticated approaches to study kinship in recent years. We argue that the development of a demography of kinship that centers on these processes will help advance the field of demography as a whole. Here, we review four key substantive areas of kinship research in demography: (1) kin supply and intergenerational transfers; (2) demographic change; (3) kin loss; and (4) social stratification. For each area, we identify important gaps in the literature and avenues for future research. We then review available methods and data sources to advance each of these areas, and conclude with an agenda to foster the study of the demography of kinship in general and kinship inequalities specifically.

Generational overlap affects the care time demands on parents and grandparents worldwide. Here, we present the first global estimates of the experience of simultaneously having frail older parents and young children (“sandwichness”) or young grandchildren (“grandsandwichness”) for the 1970–2040 cohorts, using demographic methods and microsimulations. We find that sandwichness is more prevalent in the Global South—for example, almost twice as prevalent in sub-Saharan Africa as it is in Europe for the 1970 cohort—but is expected to decline globally by one-third between 1970 and 2040. The Global North might have reached a peak in the simultaneous care time demands from multiple generations but the duration of the grandsandwich state will increase by up to one year in Africa and Asia. This increasing generational overlap implies more care time demands over the entire adult life course, but also opens up an opportunity for the full potential of grandparenthood to materialize.

The death of family members is a near-ubiquitous human experience that profoundly impacts social and psychological wellbeing. Mortality decline in high-income countries has made this experience more predictable across the life course, yet family bereavement patterns vary across socioeconomic strata. This study proposes a demographic framework for understanding how the interplay of mortality inequalities and variation in kinship structure shapes inequalities in bereavement. Drawing on life course theory, it conceptualizes the burden of bereavement as a multifaceted phenomenon relating to cumulative exposure to kin deaths (intensity), when these deaths occur during the life course (timing), and whether they follow the generational ordering (predictability). Using Swedish registry data, the study reconstructs four-generation kinship networks around the 1973 birth cohort and estimates the burden of bereavement by education and income. Inequalities in bereavement are decomposed to differences in kin mortality and structure. The findings reveal a socioeconomic gradient in family bereavement, mainly in timing and predictability effects. Individuals with lower socioeconomic status experience the death of parents, siblings, cousins, and children earlier in life. Disparities in cumulative exposure to bereavement are largely offset by differences in kin structure. This study underscores how demographic processes shape inequalities in bereavement across the life course.

Background: Kin deaths are universal, but their frequency, timing, and position within family networks vary across demographic regimes. Existing demographic research describes kin loss, but provides limited tools for summarizing its cumulative and life-course consequences. Objective: We develop a demographic framework to compare bereavement regimes across populations, focusing on three dimensions: cumulative burden, loss of shared lifetime, and generational overlap in kin deaths. Methods: We derive three indicators from age-specific kinship dynamics: bereavement burden, defined from kin-years lived after kin death; shared time lost, measured as expected kin-years of potential coexistence removed by death; and generational overlap, measuring coincidence between age-specific death schedules of different kin types. We apply the framework to female 1950 cohorts in Argentina and Guatemala using UN-2024 data and matrix kinship models. Results: The comparison identifies contrasting bereavement regimes. Guatemala has much higher burdens from child and sibling deaths and larger total losses of shared time with these kin. Argentina has a higher grandparent burden and greater shared time lost per child death. Death schedules are also more strongly overlapped in Guatemala, particularly for siblings and parents and for children and parents, whereas Argentina displays a more sequential ordering of losses across generations. Conclusions: Similar death counts can conceal markedly different bereavement experiences. The demographic meaning of loss depends on when deaths occur, how many kin are exposed, and how losses are sequenced across generations. Contribution: We extend formal kinship demography by providing three interpretable indicators that allow bereavement to be compared systematically across demographic regimes using standard population data.

U.S. life expectancy plateaued since 2010 and declined in 2014-2017 and 2020–2021, increasing the gap between the United States and its peers. This analysis calculated U.S. trends in the number of individuals who lost a close kin, such as a mother, father, at least one sibling, or at least one child, and how the number of bereaved people changes under counterfactual mortality conditions. We found that adverse mortality in 2010–2019 and spikes in mortality in 2020–2021 resulted in a substantial increase in the number of individuals bereaved annually. Increases over time were especially large for individuals bereaved by sibling loss. If the United States had maintained its rates of mortality improvement from 2000–2009, about 2.7 million fewer people would have experienced at least one close-kin loss during 2010–2019. By 2021, the excess number of individuals who had ever been bereaved since 2010 had grown to 5.6 million. Considering single years, in 2019 alone 8.6% of all bereaved individuals—around 0.9 million people—would not have lost any close relative had the United States maintained its previous pace of mortality improvement. In 2021, the corresponding annual excess rose to 25%, or about 3.2 million individuals. Excess bereavement is similar when applying the concurrent rates of mortality improvement of countries like Japan and Switzerland. Decomposition analyses revealed that excess bereavement in the United States can be explained primarily by adverse mortality trends, rather than by differences in size or composition of the population at risk. Considering population health trends from the perspective of the number bereaved shifts the focus from individual deaths to their rippling effects on surviving family, at a population scale.

The experience of losing a child is increasingly uncommon worldwide but is no less devastating for parents who experience it. An overlooked aspect of this phenomenon is its timing: at which age do bereft parents lose a child and how are these ages at loss distributed? We use demographic methods to explore the mean and variability of maternal age at child loss in 18 countries for the 1850–2000 birth cohorts. We find that the distribution of age of child loss is bimodal, with one component representing young offspring deaths and another representing adult offspring deaths. Offspring loss is transitioning from being a relatively common life event, mostly experienced by young mothers, to a rare one spread throughout the maternal life course. Moreover, there is no evidence of convergence in the variability of age at offspring loss. These results advance the formal demography of kinship and underline the need to support bereaved parents across the life course.

Importance: Youth (those aged <18 years) parental death has been associated with negative health outcomes. Understanding the burden of parental death due to drug poisoning (herein, drugs) and firearms is essential for informing interventions. Objective: To estimate the incidence of youth parental death due to drugs, firearms, and all other causes. Design, Setting, and Participants: This cross-sectional observational study was conducted using vital registration, including all US decedents, and census data from January 1990 through December 2020. Data were analyzed from May 30, 2023, to March 28, 2024. Exposures: Parental death due to drug poisoning or firearms. Main Outcomes and Measures: A demographic matrix projection model was used to estimate the number and incidence of youth experiencing parental death, defined as the death of 1 or more parents, per 1000 population aged less than 18 years. Analyses evaluated parental deaths by drugs, firearms, and all other causes from 1999 through 2020 by race and ethnicity. Results: Between 1999 and 2020, there were 931 785 drug poisoning deaths and 736 779 firearm-related deaths with a mean (SD) age of 42.6 (16.3) years. Most deaths occurred among males (73.8%) and White decedents (70.8%) followed by Black (17.5%) and Hispanic (9.5%) decedents. An estimated 759 000 (95% CI, 722 000-800 000) youth experienced parental death due to drugs and an estimated 434 000 (95% CI, 409 000-460 000) youth experienced parental death due to firearms, accounting for 17% of all parental deaths. From 1999 to 2020, the estimated number of youth who experienced parental death increased 345% (95% CI, 334%-361%) due to drugs and 39% (95% CI, 37%-41%) due to firearms compared with 24% (95% CI, 23%-25%) due to all other causes. Black youth experienced a disproportionate burden of parental deaths, based primarily on firearm deaths among fathers. In 2020, drugs and firearms accounted for 23% of all parental deaths, double the proportion in 1999 (12%). Conclusions and Relevance: Results of this modeling study suggest that US youth are at high and increasing risk of experiencing parental death by drugs or firearms. Efforts to stem this problem should prioritize averting drug overdoses and firearm violence, especially among structurally marginalized groups.

Excess mortality associated with the COVID-19 pandemic has led many to experience the loss of family members, with significant negative outcomes. We quantify the extent to which these population-wide rates of kin loss represent a departure from levels expected in the absence of COVID-19 excess mortality and consider which demographic groups are most likely to be affected. Results for biological kin in 31 countries indicate dramatic increases in excess kin loss associated with excess mortality and follow a generational pattern consistent with COVID-19 mortality risk by age. During periods of high excess mortality, the number of younger individuals losing a grandparent increased by up to 845 per 100,000, or 1.2 times expected levels (for individuals aged 30 to 44 y in the United Kingdom in April 2020), while the number of older individuals losing a sibling increased by up to 511 per 100,000 or 1.15 times (for individuals aged 65 y and over in Poland in November 2020). Our monthly multicountry estimates of excess kin loss complement existing point estimates of the number of individuals bereaved by COVID-19 mortality [Verdery et al., Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 117, 17695–17701 (2020); Kidman et al., JAMA Pediatr. 175, 745–746 (2021); Hillis et al., Lancet 398, 391–402 (2021)] and highlight the role of heterogeneous excess mortality in shaping country experiences.

The death of a child affects the well-being of parents and families worldwide, but little is known about the scale of this phenomenon. Using a novel methodology from formal demography applied to data from the 2019 Revision of the United Nations World Population Prospects, we provide the first global overview of parental bereavement, its magnitude, prevalence, and distribution over age for the 1950–2000 annual birth cohorts of women. We project that the global burden of parental bereavement will be 1.6 times lower for women born in 2000 than for women born in 1955. Accounting for compositional effects, we anticipate the largest improvements in regions of the Global South, where offspring mortality continues to be a common life event. This study quantifies an unprecedented shift in the timing of parental bereavement from reproductive to retirement ages. Women in the 1985 cohort and subsequent cohorts will be more likely to lose an adult child after age 65 than to lose a young child before age 50, reversing a long-standing global trend. “Child death” will increasingly come to mean the death of adult offspring. We project persisting regional inequalities in offspring mortality and in the availability of children in later life, a particular concern for parents dependent on support from their children after retirement. Nevertheless, our analyses suggest a progressive narrowing of the historical gap between the Global North and South in the near future. These developments have profound implications for demographic theory and highlight the need for policies to support bereaved older parents.

Non-pharmaceutical interventions have been implemented worldwide to curb the spread of COVID-19. However, the effectiveness of such governmental measures in reducing the mortality burden remains a key question of scientific interest and public debate. In this study, we leverage digital mobility data to assess the effects of reduced human mobility on excess mortality, focusing on regional data in England and Wales between February and August 2020. We estimate a robust association between mobility reductions and lower excess mortality, after adjusting for time trends and regional differences in a mixed-effects regression framework and considering a five-week lag between the two measures. We predict that, in the absence of mobility reductions, the number of excess deaths could have more than doubled in England and Wales during this period, especially in the London area. The study is one of the first attempts to quantify the effects of mobility reductions on excess mortality during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Objectives. To describe excess mortality during the COVID-19 pandemic in Guatemala during 2020 by week, age, sex, and place of death. Methods. We used mortality data from 2015 to 2020, gathered through the vital registration system of Guatemala. We calculated weekly mortality rates, overall and stratified by age, sex, and place of death. We fitted a generalized additive model to calculate excess deaths, adjusting for seasonality and secular trends and compared excess deaths to the official COVID-19 mortality count. Results. We found an initial decline of 26% in mortality rates during the first weeks of the pandemic in 2020, compared with 2015 to 2019. These declines were sustained through October 2020 for the population younger than 20 years and for deaths in public spaces and returned to normal from July onward in the population aged 20 to 39 years. We found a peak of 73% excess mortality in mid-July, especially in the population aged 40 years or older. We estimated a total of 8036 excess deaths (95% confidence interval = 7935, 8137) in 2020, 46% higher than the official COVID-19 mortality count. Conclusions. The extent of this health crisis is underestimated when COVID-19 confirmed death counts are used.

Background: We provide country-level estimates of the cumulative prevalence of mothers bereaved by a child’s death in 170 countries and territories. Methods: We generate indicators of the cumulative prevalence of mothers who have had an infant, under-five-year-old or any-age child ever die by using publicly available survey data in 89 countries and an indirect approach that combines formal kinship models and life-table methods in an additional 81 countries. We label these measures the maternal cumulative prevalence of infant mortality (mIM), under-five mortality (mU5M) and offspring mortality (mOM) and generate prevalence estimates for 20–44-year-old and 45–49-year-old mothers. Results: In several Asian and European countries, the mIM and mU5M are below 10 per 1000 mothers yet exceed 200 per 1000 mothers in several Middle Eastern and African countries. Global inequality in mothers’ experience of child loss is enormous: mothers in high-mortality-burden African countries are more than 100 times more likely to have had a child die than mothers in low-mortality-burden Asian and European countries. In more than 20 African countries, the mOM exceeds 500 per 1000 mothers, meaning that it is typical for a surviving 45–49-year-old mother to be bereaved. Discussion: The study reveals enormous global disparities in mothers’ experience of child loss and identifies a need for more research on the downstream mental and physical health risks associated with parental bereavement.

Background: The Goodman-Keyfitz-Pullum Kinship Equations estimate offspring survival for women in populations with stable levels of mortality and fertility. A separate body of literature has focused on the effects of mortality change on life expectancy. Combining these two approaches allows us to consider the effects of mortality change on offspring survival. Results: The effect of an all-age mortality increase on child survival is indirectly proportional to the mean age of an average woman’s surviving children. Equivalently, the effect is indirectly proportional to the mean time that a woman has spent with her surviving offspring. Generalizing for an age-specific mortality change follows life expectancy treatment. Contributions: We bring together two separate traditions in mathematical demography to provide an intuitive understanding of the consequences of mortality change for offspring survival and women’s lived experience of child loss. This conceptual framework can be used, for example, to study maternal bereavement in the context of a sustained mortality decline or a sudden mortality crisis.

Twenty-four months after the start of the war on the Gaza Strip, the enormity of the demographic fracture it has caused remains hidden behind a fog of statistics. In this number, a team of researchers from the Centre for Demographic Studies (CED) and the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (MPIDR) uses a Bayesian approach, to present an assessment that corrects the 40 % structural under-reporting in the official mortality statistics. The results show a demographic collapse that is unprecedented in recent history: a population decline of 10.6 % and a toll of more than 115,000 direct deaths, which is equivalent to the loss of 5 % of the initial resident population. Disaggregated by “war years”, the analysis captures the extreme intensity of the conflict. During the first year, risk of mortality increased 12.7 times and life expectancy plummeted to 29.5 years. In the second year, the risk was 7.4 times above the baseline and life expectancy stood at 40.4 years. In terms of survival levels, these figures represent a historic regression of a century, reverting to levels typifying the end of the Ottoman era. The structure of excess mortality confirms a pattern of transversal violence that systematically affects the non-combatant population in which children, women, and the elderly account for 57 % of victims in the first year, and more than 40 % in the second. This toll of direct violence is compounded by a sharp decline in the birthrate and a humanitarian and environmental crisis with lethal consequences that will continue to generate excess mortality long after any eventual ceasefire. Rigorously assessing the scale of this devastation is an essential ethical and scientific step in providing the foundations of evidence-based reparations processes.

The ongoing Colombian armed conflict has produced widespread homicides and enforced disappearances, as armed actors used violence to terrorize communities and consolidate power. Family bereavement—one of the most pervasive and enduring consequences of this violence—remains critically understudied from a quantitative perspective. We quantify the population burden of bereavement—ever having lost a family member to conflict—using kinship demographic models applied to 1985–2018 data compiled by the Truth Commission and the Special Jurisdiction for Peace, corrected for under-registration. By 2018, an estimated 7.5% of Colombians had lost a close relative and about 40% had lost at least one family member to conflict. Even assuming an over-optimistic scenario with no post-2018 violence, demographic projections indicate that conflict-related bereavement will remain visible well into the 2080s. Results are robust to subnational heterogeneity and alternative “bereavement memory” specifications. Reading these estimates alongside the Commission’s qualitative record underscores bereavement as a strategic mechanism of repression aimed at fracturing kin networks and community cohesion rather than a collateral by-product. Our demographic profiling of the bereaved informs population-health and psychosocial responses, including support for relatives of the disappeared, and can guide reparations and community-based programs that rebuild kin and neighborhood ties while strengthening guarantees of non-repetition.

Resumen

La construcción de la Hidroeléctrica de Chixoy en Guatemala, un megaproyecto destinado a reducir la dependencia energética del país, fue acompañada de actos de genocidio en contra de comunidades indígenas en el área. Este artículo reconstruye sus efectos demográficos para la población de Río Negro entre 1982 y 2015. Aquí, sostengo que el uso de una perspectiva de parentesco para estudiar el genocidio guatemalteco proporciona valiosos conocimientos sobre: 1) cómo el exceso de mortalidad afecta la exposición a la pérdida de parentesco, y 2) cómo la situación de pérdida puede contribuir a la reproducción de la memoria histórica a largo plazo. Exploro ambos procesos utilizando una base de datos genealógica única, ya que registra la historia demográfica completa de Río Negro. El análisis muestra que las muertes derivadas del genocidio de 1982 estuvieron equilibradas por edad, género y estatus socioeconómico. Un tercio de la población fue asesinada, pero dos tercios sufrieron la pérdida de algún pariente (el 10% de las personas afectadas perdieron el 30% de los integrantes de su familia nuclear y el 23% de su familia extensa). Cabe destacar que la proporción de la población relacionada con una víctima no cambió entre 1983 y 2015. El legado del genocidio asociado a la Hidroeléctrica de Chixoy perdura entre los sobrevivientes y sus descendientes y constituye, hoy, un componente imprescindible para la memoria histórica nacional.

Abstract

The construction of the Chixoy Hydroelectric Dam in Guatemala—a major infrastructure project intended to reduce the country’s dependence on external energy sources—was accompanied by acts of genocide against Indigenous communities in the surrounding area. This article reconstructs its demographic consequences for the population of Río Negro between 1982 and 2015. I argue that adopting a kinship perspective to study the Guatemalan genocide yields valuable insights into (1) how excess mortality shapes individuals’ exposure to kin loss, and (2) how widespread bereavement may contribute to the long-term reproduction of historical memory. I examine both processes using a unique genealogical database that records the complete demographic history of Río Negro. The analysis shows that deaths in the 1982 genocide were evenly distributed by age, sex, and socioeconomic status. One third of the population was killed, but two thirds experienced the loss of at least one relative (the 10% most affected individuals lost 30% of their nuclear family and 23% of their extended kin). Notably, the share of the population related to a victim did not change between 1983 and 2015. The legacy of the genocide associated with the Chixoy Dam continues to shape the lives of survivors and their descendants and today constitutes an essential component of national historical memory.

The ongoing Gaza War has resulted in significant loss of life and intensified an existing humanitarian crisis. Despite increasing demand for accurate data, mortality estimates remain challenging due to the inherent ‘statistical fog of war’. Accurate quantification is hindered by incomplete reporting and uncertain age-sex distributions of casualties. Official death tolls are likely influenced by damaged infrastructure, security disruptions, and political motivations, complicating detailed demographic verification. Our study introduces a novel methodological approach—a Bayesian model incorporating novel priors—to explicitly account for measurement errors in mortality estimation by addressing reporting completeness and uncertainty in demographic distributions. We use these methods to estimate sex- and age-specific mortality patterns and associated life expectancy (LE) and LE losses due to direct conflict deaths from the Gaza War. We find that LE in Gaza was 42.3 (39.4-45.0) in 2023 and 40.4 (37.5-43.0) in 2024, corresponding to LE losses of 34.4 (31.7-37.3) and 36.4 (33.8-39.3) years, respectively, compared to a counterfactual scenario with no conflict-related deaths. This corresponds to 78,318 (70,614-87,504) conflict deaths by the end of 2024, reflecting a 14-fold increase in all-cause mortality during the conflict’s first year. The age–sex pattern of Gaza’s conflict deaths aligns with UN-IGME profiles from past genocides. To contextualize these estimates, we compare them with LE losses observed in the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, and all of Palestine between 2012 and 2019. Our estimates align with previously published work, after adjusting the reporting priors to ignore underreporting. Our versatile and robust framework for mortality estimation under conditions of data scarcity can inform future conflict research.

Armed conflicts escalate combatant and civilian mortality and produce considerable levels of family bereavement. Yet, we know little about the prevalence of bereavement in conflict-affected populations. The violent loss of kin affects individuals across several dimensions, including trauma, mental health, socioeconomic status, and caregiving, especially during childhood and old age. Here, we propose a method to quantify population-level loss of parents and offspring in conflict-affected populations. Our analyses demonstrate that bereavement levels consistently surpass fatality rates in 16 conflict-affected settings. Using demographic projections, we show that these populations will continue to experience considerable levels of bereavement in the coming decades, independent of the future development of the respective conflicts. This quantification underscores bereavement as a profound yet understudied consequence of conflict with potentially far-reaching implications lingering long after the conflict’s end.

The Israel-Hamas war, triggered by the October 7th 2023 Hamas-led attack in Israel, has caused extensive mortality and sparked a major humanitarian crisis in the region. Direct conflict mortality has been mostly concentrated among non-combatants in the Gaza Strip. Here, most of the population has been internally displaced and faces limited access to food, water, shelter, sanitation, and essential health services. We aim to assess the impact of conflict deaths reported between October and December 2023 on life expectancy at birth (LE) in Palestine —including Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem. For this, we combine multiple sources of data on combatant and non-combatant fatalities and use demographic methods to impute the missing sex and age distribution of conflict mortality. We focus on LE because it is a widely used mortality indicator that is not affected by the population's age distribution and can be meaningfully compared across populations and over time.

Mortality crises are relatively common demographic events, but we know little about how they affect local populations beyond excess mortality. I argue that using a kinship perspective to study mortality crises provides valuable insights into (1) how excess mortality affects the exposure to kin loss and (2) how family bereavement may contribute to the reproduction of historical memory in the long term. I explore these two processes using a unique genealogical database that records the complete demographic history of Rio Negro, a genocide-affected population in Guatemala, between 1982 and 2015. The analysis shows that deaths from the 1982 genocide were balanced by age, sex, and socioeconomic status. One third of the population were killed, but two thirds were left bereaved (the top 10% most affected individuals lost 30% of their nuclear family relatives and 23% of their extended family relatives). Notably, the proportion of the population related to a victim did not change between 1983 and 2015. The persistence of family bereavement can be interpreted as a prolongation of grief or as a driver of historical memory. These demographic dynamics have implications for the study of historical events beyond mortality crises.

Background: Conducting demographic research on armed conflicts is challenging because conflicts can affect the quality of primary data collection or halt the production of evidence altogether. Most of the existing methods for collecting time-variant demographic data cannot be used with war-affected populations. Objective: This paper introduces the Extended Genealogy Method (EGM), a toolkit for collecting high-quality data for demographic analysis using cross-checked extended genealogies. The paper assesses the quality of the data produced by the EGM by focusing on an empirical application of the method. Methods: The EGM uses chain-referral sampling to create extended kinship networks that include all members of a local population. The multiple reporting that results from the sampling strategy is used to reduce the error associated with retrospective reporting. Results: Data on 3,566 unique individuals and 1,986 marriages were collected from 100 EGM interviews. The paper shows how the EGM-generated data was used to reconstruct the excess mortality from the 1982 Río Negro Massacres in Guatemala, a wartime event that produced very high excess mortality in the population. Conclusions: The EGM produced reliable and complete demographic data. The sampling and data processing strategies addressed retrospective and selection bias and helped evaluate data completion. The EGM can be used to reconstruct the demographic history of other local populations. Contribution: The method can be applied to reconstruct demographic dynamics in contexts of data scarcity, such as during and after armed conflicts. The EGM produces time-variant social network data useful to study, for example, intergenerational support or the transmission of demographic traits and behaviours over time.

Background: In the occupied Palestinian territory (oPt), access to maternal and child healthcare (MCH) services are constrained due to the prolonged Israeli military occupation, the Separation Wall, army checkpoints, and restrictions on the movement of people and goods. This study assesses the relationship between conflict intensity and access to Maternal and Child Health care in occupied Palestinian territory (oPt). To the best of our knowledge, the impact of conflict on access to health care has not been measured due to the lack of data. Methods: We analyse pooled data from household surveys covering a fifteen-year period (2000–2014) of children (n = 16,793) and women (n = 8477) in five regions of the oPt. Conflict intensity was used as a continuous variable defined as the square root of non-combatant conflict mortality taken from monthly death rates of non-combatants by region. We use multilevel logistic models to explain four outputs: child vaccination schedules, antenatal care, caesarean sections, and complications during pregnancy. Results: Locality is important with results showing the negative impact of conflict intensity on access to care, especially in the South West Bank for maternal health services and Central West Bank for vaccination (B −0.161 p = 0.000 for DPT). Wealth is only significant for DPT vaccinations with poorest (B −0.098 p = 0.005) and poor (B −0.148 p = 0.002) individuals less likely to access services. Otherwise conflict does not show a differential effect across socio-economic conditions. Conclusions: This study shows how locality is the strongest factor when looking at the impact of conflict in the oPt. Preventative services (ANC and vaccinations) are the most affected by conflict. We recommend a greater use of community health care to improve access to maternal and child care when barriers impede access to health facilities during times of conflict.

Estimating kinship networks is a data-intensive undertaking, usually conducted using empirical sources or demographic models. Although empirical data, such as population registers, provide observed individual-level information, they are limited by availability, truncation, and survivorship bias. Demographic models, including microsimulation, require less detailed data, but they often minimally account for population heterogeneity, family similarity, and multi-partner fertility. This study examines the agreement of kin counts (from grandparents to grandchildren) between SOCSIM microsimulation outputs and Swedish population registers for cohorts born between 1915 and 2017. The results show that microsimulation closely approximates mean kin numbers and reasonably reflects parity distributions. Microsimulation underestimates kin for recent cohorts not affected by truncation but provides a more accurate representation of kin for earlier cohorts with missing parent–child links. These findings highlight the utility of microsimulation for reconstructing kinship when only population-level rates are available, supporting its application in kinship analyses, both historical and projected.

An incomplete understanding of biases affecting the representativeness of genealogies has hindered their full exploitation. We report on a series of experiments on synthetic populations assessing how structural biases in ascendant genealogies affect the accuracy of demographic estimates. Using the SOCSIM microsimulation programme and Swedish fertility and mortality data (1751–2022), we analyse three biases: lineage survival, limited coverage of collateral kin, and selective omission. Comparing demographic measures from ‘fully recorded’ and ‘bias-infused’ synthetic populations, we find that across the period, including only direct ancestors can underestimate total fertility rate (TFR) (≈−42%) and overestimate life expectancy at birth (e0) (≈+33%), mainly due to missing infant, child, and some young adult deaths. Including direct ancestors’ offspring shifts TFR to overestimation (≈+21%) while improving mortality estimation across all ages, with e0 overestimation reduced to ≈+1.8%. Our study shows that completeness of family trees is essential for obtaining accurate demographic estimates from genealogies.

Digital and computational demography explores demography in relation to the digital revolution – the rapid technological improvements in digitized information storage, computational power and the spread of the internet and mobile technologies since the turn of the new millennium. We cover three ways in which the digital revolution touches upon demography. First, we discuss how digital technologies, through their impacts on daily lives and in shifting how individuals access information, communicate and access services, have implications for demographic outcomes linked to health and mortality, fertility and family, and migration. Second, we discuss how the digital revolution has created a wide range of new data sources such as digital trace and geospatial data that can be repurposed for demographic research, and enabled respondent recruitment across the world via the internet and social media. Third, we discuss how improvements in computational power have facilitated the use of computational methods such as microsimulation and agent-based modelling as well as machine learning techniques for demographic applications. We conclude by discussing future opportunities and challenges for digital demography.

The legacy of Eurocentrism continues to affect knowledge production in the social sciences. Evidence produced in and about the global North is assumed to be more “universal,” whereas evidence from or produced in the global South is considered valid only for specific contexts (i.e., “localized”). We argue that these dynamics are evident in the phrasing of articles’ titles based on the examination of more than half a million social science research articles indexed by Scopus (1996 to 2020). We find that empirical articles written by authors affiliated to institutions of the global North, using data from these countries, are less likely to include a concrete geographical reference in their titles. When authors are affiliated to global South institutions, and use evidence from global South countries, the names of these countries are more likely to be part of the article’s title. We confirm this overarching pattern by looking at 1) differences between world regions, 2) differences within world regions, and 3) patterns in 23 social science subfields. These gaps are large and consistent, yet article naming conventions are merely the “tip of the iceberg” of the imbalances in knowledge production between the global North and South.

In recent years, online communities have created genealogical records that span multiple continents over several centuries and contain demographic information for millions of people. However, these data are unrepresentative, and extracting accurate population information presents a major methodological challenge. We construct a Bayesian model that combines structured mortality estimation and smoothing techniques to correct mortality rates derived from FamiLinx, a large crowd-sourced genealogical dataset. Our model estimates and extrapolates a set of adjustment factors that capture the discrepancy between genealogy-derived rates and more reliable data from the Human Mortality Database. We apply our method to estimate 19th-century mortality rates for countries and time periods that are not covered by the high quality data to demonstrate out-of-sample performance. Our results illustrate a wide range of underreporting patterns across age, time, and between countries. In particular, we find that mortality is most severely underreported among young ages, ranging from a factor of 1/2 to under 1/10 the estimated true mortality rate. Understanding and accounting for these biases will be critical to future research using these data.

Missing children, i.e., children reported to a relevant authority as having “disappeared,” constitute an important but often overlooked population. From a research perspective, missing children constitute a hard-to-reach population about which little is known. This is a particular problem in regions of the Global South that lack robust or centralized data collection systems. In this study, we analyze the composition of the population of missing children in Guatemala, a country with high levels of violence. We contrast the official aggregated-level data from the Guatemalan National Police during the 2018-2020 period with real-time individual-level data on missing children from the official Twitter account of the Alerta Alba-Keneth, a governmental warning system tasked with disseminating information about missing children. Using the Twitter data, we characterize the population of missing children in Guatemala by single-year age, sex, and place of disappearance. Our results show that women are more likely to be reported as missing, particularly those aged 13-17. We discuss the findings in light of the known links between missing people, violence, and human trafficking. Finally, the study highlights the potential of web data to contribute to society by improving our understanding of this and similar hard-to-reach populations.

Crowdsourced online genealogies have an unprecedented potential to shed light on long-run population dynamics, if analyzed properly. We investigate whether the historical mortality dynamics of males in familinx, a popular genealogical dataset, are representative of the general population, or whether they are closer to those of an elite subpopulation in two territories. The first territory is the German Empire, with a low level of genealogical coverage relative to the total population size, while the second territory is The Netherlands, with a higher level of genealogical coverage relative to the population. We find that, for the period around the turn of the 20th century (for which benchmark national life tables are available), mortality is consistently lower and more homogeneous in familinx than in the general population. For that time period, the mortality levels in familinx resemble those of elites in the German Empire, while they are closer to those in national life tables in The Netherlands. For the period before the 19th century, the mortality levels in familinx mirror those of the elites in both territories. We identify the low coverage of the total population and the oversampling of elites in online genealogies as potential explanations for these findings. Emerging digital data may revolutionize our knowledge of historical demographic dynamics, but only if we understand their potential uses and limitations.

The spread of digital technologies and the increased access to the internet has contributed to the production and accumulation of unprecedented quantities of data about human behavior. Demographers, who have a long-standing interest in issues related to data and data quality, are in an ideal position to make sense of this new information. This paper discusses three ways in which the Data Revolution has created novel sources of data for demographic research. It discusses the unique technical and ethical challenges posed by these data sources and the opportunities they provide for understanding historical and contemporary demographic dynamics around the world.

We examine whether differences in the reporting of workplace case-study research methods are associated with gender, experience, academic rank and PhD training. Using a random sample of published articles, we find that women take more care reporting their research methods in the context of a general increase in methods reporting.