Seminar Series

In this presentation, the Multiphasic Response model is used as a foundation for understanding the relationship between land use change (agricultural development), fertility and human migration in the Ecuadorian Amazon. Davis' 1963 Theory of Multiphasic Response proposed that individuals and households recognize the need to change demographic behavior to avoid declines in standards of living and to take advantage of economic opportunities. Novel to Davis' argument was that people will respond to external economic dynamics both sequentially and simultaneously, hence the term multiphasic.

That women live longer than men may be a well-known phenomenon. But why women live longer than men is much less well understood. I first briefly review the state of knowledge about sex differences in mortality and identify gaps in this knowledge. It is useful to revisit the old but powerful hypothesis that biology plays a role. The question is how. I lay out a framework of research that integrates biology into social demographic models and population research.

In this talk, Pearce will highlight key findings from her book A Faith of Their Own: Stability and Change in the Religiosity of American Adolescents, coauthored with Melinda Lundquist Denton (Clemson). Drawing on debates over the definition and operationalization of religiosity in the sociology of religion, Pearce and Denton offer a revised view of religiosity as a person-based, or categorical variable, rather than a low-to-high continuous concept.

A large body of work in economics and other disciplines has investigated the relationship between family structure- including birth order, family size, and sibling composition- and children's outcomes. However, the age difference between siblings (spacing) has received much less attention in the economic literature, despite the fact that child spacing "may well be the most important aspect of fertility differentials in low-fertility societies" (Wineberg and McCarthy 1989).

Good survey practice requires the computation and presentation of the response rate for the realized sample. The response rate is an indicator of the potential bias associated with sample-specific estimates of population parameters, but it is only an indicator, since the extent of bias due to non-response also hinges on the differences in the population between respondents and non-respondents. This latter quantity is oft-surmised but rarely known, and in practice reactivity to response rates is generally a gestalt, with summary assessments on the order of "too low" or "good enough".

Little is known about the situation facing widows andtheir dependent children in West Africa especially afterthe widow remarries. Women in Malian society arevulnerable to the loss of husbands especially in ruralareas. Households headed by widows have significantlylower living standards on average than male or otherfemale headed households in both rural and urbanareas; this holds both unconditionally and conditionalon observable household and individual characteristics including age.

There has been great interest in one dimension of mortality change, aggregate human life expectancy. I focus on a distinct dimension, the variance in the age at adult death. I explain why this measure matters, discuss historical trends in this variance, and compare trends across countries. I discuss the relationship between the pattern of adult death and socioeconomic inequalities, in factors such as education and income, using data from the US. Finally I examine the sources of variance in the context of models of the life cycle.

This paper provides a systematic analysis of identification in linear social networks models. This is both a theoretical and an econometric exercise in that it links identification analysis to a rigorously delineated model of interdependent decisions. We develop a Bayes-Nash equilibrium analysis for interdependent decisions under incomplete information in networks that produces linear strategy profiles of the type conventionally used in empirical work and which nests linear social interactions models as a special case.

Prior estimates of the magnitude of the association between obesity and mortality have varied widely and have been a source of ongoing debates and controversies. Some prior studies have indicated that mortality attributable to obesity rivals that of cigarette smoking, while other research points toward a more modest role for obesity. In my talk, I will review prior controversies and discuss relevant methodological challenges pertinent to estimating obesity risks. I will present selected evidence from my prior work on this topic.

Dr. Valente will discuss the field of social network analysis and introduce several key hypotheses that show how networks influence behavior. He will present data from individual and community level studies on adolescent smoking, substance use, community coalitions, physician behavior, and transnational policy change among others. He will also present a taxonomy of network-based interventions and explore the utility of using social network data for accelerating the diffusion of innovations.