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Fertility Transitions in the Developing World

By PAA Web posted 8 days ago
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Fertility Transitions in the Developing World by John Bongaarts and Dennis Hodgson (Springer, 2022). This open access book provides an overview and analysis of the causes and consequences of the massive and highly consequential transition in reproductive behavior that occurred in Asia, Latin America, and Africa since the mid-20th century. In the 1950s contraceptive use was rare in these regions, and women typically spend most of their reproductive years bearing and rearing children. By 2020 fertility and contraceptive use in Asia and Latin America had reached levels commonly observed in the developed world. Africa’s fertility is still high, but transitions ...

2022 PAA Election Results

By PAA Web posted 14 days ago
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Congratulations to the new PAA officers and board and committee members. Thank you to the 53% of members who voted in this election, and a tremendous thank you to all candidates who were willing to participate. All terms begin January 1, 2023, except for the Nominations Committee (terms begin immediately). President-elect Jennifer Glass, University of Texas at Austin Vice President-elect Susan L. Brown, Bowling Green State University Board of Directors Jennie Brand, University of California, Los Angeles Karen Benjamin Guzzo, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Sarah Hayford, The Ohio State University ...

Thomas K. Burch (1934 - 2022)

By PAA Web posted 08-23-2022
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Thomas Kirby Burch, December 15, 1934 - July 26, 2022 Thomas Burch was born in Baltimore, Maryland on December 15, 1934. He was one of three sons born to his parents, Thaddeus and Frances Burch. All three sons attended Catholic schools in Baltimore and pursued a graduate education. Tom’s oldest brother Francis Burch completed his Ph.D. in comparative literature at the Sorbonne in Paris and taught literature at St. Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. Tom’s other brother Thaddeus Burch completed his Ph.D. in physics at Fordham University and was professor in the Department of Physics at Marquette University. Both of Tom’s brothers pursued Catholic religious ...

International Handbook of Population Policies

By PAA Web posted 08-23-2022
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Authors: John F. May, Jack A. Goldstone International Handbook of Population Policies Examines contemporary population policies, their evolution, and their prospects Addresses key population challenges globally Provides an up-to-date review of theoretical concepts and policy This Handbook offers an array of internationally recognized experts’ essays that provide a current and comprehensive examination of all dimensions of international population policies. The book examines the theoretical foundations, the historical and empirical evidence for policy formation, the policy levers and modelling, as well as the new policy challenges. The section Theoretical ...

UCLA Fielding School Names Dr. Jessica Gipson Fred H. Bixby Chair in Population and Reproductive Health

By PAA Web posted 08-18-2022
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Gipson will also serve as Director of the UCLA Bixby Center on Population and Reproductive Health Dr. Jessica Gipson , UCLA Fielding School of Public Health professor in the Department of Community Health Sciences, has been appointed director of the Bixby Center on Population and Reproductive Health (Bixby Center) and the Fred H. Bixby Chair in Population and Reproductive Health Science (Bixby Chair), effective July 1. “The Bixby Center on Population and Reproductive Health at UCLA Fielding plays an important role in advancing research and providing learning opportunities for our students,” said Dr. Ron Brookmeyer , dean of the UCLA Fielding School ...

Abortion Laws and Future PAA Meetings

By PAA Web posted 06-30-2022
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The PAA Executive Committee is deeply disappointed by the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade. We are writing to address concerns raised about the PAA 2023 annual meeting being held in New Orleans now that Louisiana has among the most stringent anti-abortion laws in the country. PAA has released a statement about the negative implications of abortion restrictions and is working to ensure that the annual meeting program includes multiple sessions about reproductive health and abortion care and educational opportunities for local policymakers to understand the impact of their state’s laws. We are committed to ensuring that PAA meeting attendees ...

Announcing the New Sara McLanahan Award

By PAA Web posted 06-28-2022
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The PAA Awards Committee and Board of Directors is pleased to announce the creation of a new PAA Award in memory of Sara McLanahan. The McLanahan Award will be given biannually in honor of Sara McLanahan, who was a remarkable scholar, mentor, and policy advisor. The award will go to a senior scholar in recognition of extraordinary contributions to the study of family change, the well-being of children and families, and related social policies. The award will recognize an individual’s own intellectual contributions that reflect cumulative accomplishments and establishment of an excellent publication record of research on families and children, ideally with ...

2022 PAA Officers Election Slate of Nominees

By PAA Web posted 05-03-2022
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The Nominations Committee is pleased to put forward the following slate for the 2022 PAA Election. The Nominations Committee includes Marcy Carlson (University of Wisconsin-Madison), Sara Curran (University of Washington), and Steven Ruggles (University of Minnesota). PAA members will receive a ballot in their e-mail inbox this summer. President Jennifer Glass, University of Texas at Austin Yu Xie, Princeton University Vice President Susan Brown, Bowling Green State University Jenna Johnson-Hanks, University of California, Berkeley Board Jennie Brand, University of California, Los Angeles Juanita Chinn, NICHD Lina Guzman, Child Trends Karen Guzzo, ...

Biodemography: An Introduction to Concepts and Methods

By PAA Web posted 03-29-2022
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CEDA affiliate Professor James Carey at the University of California, Davis, and his co-author Professor Deborah Roach at the University of Virginia, have released the book Biodemography: An Introduction to Concepts and Methods (2020, Princeton University Press) with a Foreword by James Vaupel. Carey has developed over 170 scripted, closed-captioned videos of complementary lectures to the book, available on this CEDA webpage . The 11-chapter book covers all of the major areas of demography from Lexis diagrams, life tables, and mortality models to stable population theory, age-stage models and applied demography (in both humans and non-human species). The ...

America’s Post-Pandemic Future: A Demographic Perspective

By David Swanson posted 01-04-2022
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David A. Swanson, Peter Morrison, Dudley Poston , Steven Krantz , Arni Rao * During the 365-day period ending December 1, 2021, official data registered 265,377 COVID-19 deaths nationwide to persons 15 and older living in the 50 U.S. states , bringing the total COVID-19 deaths to more than 800,000 . This death toll is approaching the nearly 850,000 deaths that occurred during the Civil War . If this year’s pace continues over the coming year, we will see over 1 million total deaths due to COVID-19 and its variants, which will exceed not only the death toll from the Civil War but all of the wars and military actions in which the US has engaged since ...

Sara McLanahan (1940-2021)

By PAA Web posted 01-04-2022
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by Kathryn Edin Sara McLanahan, the William S. Tod Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs, passed away on December 31 at 3:15 p.m. Sara Frances Smith was born in Tyler, Texas, on December 27, 1940, where she lived with her parents and sister until moving to Millbrook, New York, to attend Bennett College in 1959. Graduating with highest honors, she moved to Northampton, Massachusetts, to attend Smith College in 1961, but dropped out to marry Ellery McLanahan in 1962. By the early 1970s, Sara, her husband, and the couple’s three children had settled in Houston, where, in 1972, the couple divorced. Shortly thereafter, Sara completed her undergraduate degree ...

Harley L. Browning (1927-2021)

By PAA Web posted 12-22-2021
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Harley L. Browning passed away at his home in Boulder, Colorado on June 21, 2021, at the age of 94. Surviving him are his wife Waltraut Feindt Browning (Waldi), two sons Erik and Tulio, five grandchildren, and his twin brother Clyde. Harley was born in Akron, Ohio on April 28, 1927. After receiving his BA degree from Kent State in 1949, he began his graduate training at the University of California, Berkeley in the early 1950s, earning his Ph.D. degree under Kingsley Davis in 1962. His dissertation, “Urbanization in Mexico,” laid the foundation for a long-­term research agenda about migration and urban development in Latin America. At Berkeley, Harley met his ...

G. Edward Ebanks (1938-2021)

By PAA Web posted 12-14-2021
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Dr G. Edward Ebanks (1938-2021) passed away on Monday, November 8, 2021 at the Elisabeth Bruyere Health Centre Hospice after a brief battle with cancer. Eddie grew up in a small rural community on the south coast of Jamaica, where he excelled in school, winning scholarships throughout this period. He studied mathematics at the University of the West Indies. He then went to Cornell University for post graduate studies with a full scholarship from the Population Council in 1964. He got the prestigious Population Council scholarship for three years, 1964-1966 and again in 1967-68. By 1968 he had completed his M.A and Ph.D. in sociology, specializing in demography. ...

William F. Stinner (1938-2021)

By PAA Web posted 12-07-2021
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William F. Stinner was born in Allentown, PA, to German immigrants. Much of his research and life reflected that Allentown beginning. Known as Bill throughout his life, Stinner served in the United States Navy in the late 1950s and later moved on to a successful career as a researcher, mentor, and teacher. After completing his undergraduate coursework, Bill married Carol McKewen in 1961; they shared life together for 56 years, until her passing in 2017. Bill’s academic career began with an AB at Columbia University, followed by MA and PhD degrees at Pennsylvania State University. He came to Utah State University (USU) in 1973 following several terms ...

Broadband Access During a Pandemic: 2020 Census Results for the Hopi and Lummi Reservations

By David Swanson posted 11-29-2021
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David A. Swanson, Ph.D. Edward A. Dickson Emeritus Professor, 2020-21, Department of Sociology, University of California Riverside, Riverside, CA USA 92521 Affiliated Faculty, Center for Studies in Demography & Ecology, University of Washington, Seattle, WA USA 98195 Research Fellow, Social Science Research Center, Mississippi State University, Starkville, MS 39759-7810 The accurate count of the populations of American Indian reservations is known to be difficult and subject to net undercount error. When a census is conducted using a new response tool (the Internet) while subject to the turmoil of a pandemic and political interference, one ...

Newly Elected PAA Officers, Board and Committee Members

By PAA Web posted 08-24-2021
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Congratulations to the new PAA officers and board and committee members. It was a very close race! Thank you to the members who voted in this election, to all candidates who were willing to participate. All terms begin January 1, 2022, except for the Nominations Committee (terms begin immediately). President-elect Lisa Berkman, Harvard University Vice President-elect James Raymo, Princeton University Board of Directors Emilio Parrado, University of Pennsylvania Rogelio Saenz, University of Texas at San Antonio Christine Schwartz, University of Wisconsin-Madison Florencia Torche, Stanford University Nominations Committee ...

The Fundamental Flaw Underlying Synthetic Microdata: A Simple Example

By PAA Web posted 06-07-2021
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by David A. Swanson , University of California Riverside, Riverside, CA The Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology, University of Washington, Seattle, WA Social Science Research Center, Mississippi State University, Starkville, MS Introduction The US Census Bureau is examining the possibility of creating “synthetic microdata sets” to be used by researchers in place of the “PUMS” (Public Use Microdata Sample) files now being made available . Along with others, I believe that this is a mistake . These synthetic data sets will be created from “real” data by modeling the relationships ...

New Data Source: Demographic Consequences of the Zika and Covid Epidemics (DeCodE)

By PAA Web posted 05-25-2021
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By Ryan Lloyd, DeCodE Project Coordinator The DeCodE (Demographic Consequences of the Zika and Covid Epidemics) Project is a project funded by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and based out of the University of Texas-Austin, in collaboration with the Federal University of Minas Gerais and the Federal University of Pernambuco. We are collecting novel panel data on reproductive health and fertility behavior in Brazil in order to understand the geographic and socioeconomic heterogeneity of reproductive responses to public health shocks. The Decode Project has just finished its first round of panel data collection in 2020, and is currently ...

PAA 2021 Recap and Reflections

By PAA Web posted 05-24-2021
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by Robert A. Hummer & Marcy Carlson, Program Co-Chairs We are very pleased (and relieved) to report that PAA 2021 was a resounding success! Of course, when we were elected to serve as President and Vice-President of PAA, respectively, we never envisioned we would be organizing a virtual annual meeting…! But once the PAA Board of Directors made the smart decision to meet virtually instead of in-person, and did so with enough time available for us to plan ahead, we did our best to work with the PAA staff to put together the most scientifically engaging and well-organized meeting possible. Thanks to the tremendous efforts of the staff and many volunteer members ...

The Effect of the Differential Privacy Disclosure Avoidance System Proposed by the Census Bureau on 2020 Census Products: Four Case Studies of Census Blocks in Alaska

By PAA Web posted 03-30-2021
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Authors: David A. Swanson, University of California Riverside, Riverside, CA and The Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology, University of Washington, Seattle, WA (email: dswanson@ucr.edu ) T.M. Bryan, Bryan Demographic Research, Richmond, VA (email: tom@bryangeodemo.com) Richard Sewell, Alaska Department of Transportation and Public Facilities, Anchorage, AK (email: resewell@gmail.com ) Introduction The Census Bureau plans to introduce a new Disclosure Avoidance System known as Differential Privacy (DP) for its 2020 census ...