Seminar Series

Populations across the globe are experiencing demographic transitions related to aging, migration and women joining the paid labor force. In spite of these major demographic transitions, work places policies and practices have not often been responsive to such demographic changes, especially in the United States. Health may be impacted by the mounting demands experienced by many workers, especially among women in low wage occupations. Findings related to these demographic transitions are presented. In addition, recent findings from a study of low wage employees are discussed.

Sampling from a network using a random walk based approach such as Respondent Driven Sampling (RDS) is difficult because the sample can get stuck in isolated clusters of the network, reducing precision. In this paper we propose an alternative strategy Network Sampling with Memory (NSM) that uses social network data collected from respondents to increase the efficiency of the sampling process.

Executive functions are a suite of related cognitive functions that allow one to hold in mind goal relevant information and exclude from mind goal irrelevant information. Based on clinical and neuroimaging studies cognitive neuroscientists believe that these functions are central to the performance of goal directed behavior.

Extant estimates of the number of deaths that resulted from the Khmer-Rouge ruling of Cambodia range from half a million to over three million excess deaths--a huge range considering that the country's total population size was about 8 million at the outset of the Khmer-Rouge regime. In this presentation, I describe this unsatisfactory range and investigate whether it can be narrowed with either new data or a better approach.

Political and economic transition is often blamed for Russia's 40% surge in deaths between 1990 and 1994 (the "Russian Mortality Crisis"). Highlighting that increases in mortality occurred primarily among alcohol-related causes and among working-age men (the heaviest drinkers), this paper investigates a different explanation: the demise of the 1985-1988 Gorbachev Anti-Alcohol Campaign.

There is growing evidence that local conditions, particularly economic considerations, shape the geographic dispersion of immigrant groups. Yet our understanding of the impact of local variation in public policies on immigrants internal settlement patterns remains rudimentary. This paper takes advantage of local area variation in immigration policies and economic conditions to estimate their unique impact on changes in the size of local Mexican immigrant populations between 2007 and 2009.

In 1950 men and women in the United States had a combined life expectancy of 68.9 years, the 12th highest life expectancy at birth in the world. Today, life expectancy is up to 79.2 years, yet the country is now 28th on the list, behind the United Kingdom, Korea, Canada, and France, among others. This presentation examines patterns in international differences in life expectancy above age 50 and assesses the evidence and arguments that have been advanced to explain the poor position of the United States relative to other countries.

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.