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Leveraging Facebook's Advertising Platform to Monitor Stocks of Migrants
Online advertising is the main source of revenue for social media companies. Facebook allows advertisers to target users with certain characteristics, such as age, sex, country of origin, education level, or topical interest. Before an ad is launched, Facebook's advertising platform provides an estimate of how many users match the provided criteria. This functionality, akin to a digital census of Facebook users, has so far been untapped for demographic research. We show the feasibility of estimating stocks of migrants within and across countries and discuss the potentials and limitations of the data. The lack of much-needed information about migrants, together with the rapid global expansion of social media use and the online advertising industry, offers new opportunities to study migration and to monitor progress toward achieving the goals of the United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.
Journal Article
Family Change and Changing Family Demography
Increases in life expectancy, high rates of movement into and out of couple relationships, and increasing exposure to stepfamilies raise new questions about who is in a family, the distinction between who lives together and who is a family member, and the extent to which family members are expected to meet the long-term obligations that define kinship. These questions are important because families have traditionally served as a vital private safety net for family members. Demographic changes increase family members' uncertainty about their relationships. Family ties are less stable and more uncertain among the economically disadvantaged, and uncertainty may exacerbate these disadvantages by weakening individuals' ability to rely on family members' support to alleviate hardship. I argue that demographers should focus on individuals' family relationships to gain insight into living arrangements and family dynamics. I also outline the development of family concepts and improvements in study design to identify principles that demographers should incorporate in new research to shed light on families' support for their members.
Journal Article
Does Despair Really Kill? A Roadmap for an Evidence-Based Answer
Two seemingly associated demographic trends have generated considerable interest: income stagnation and rising premature mortality from suicides, drug poisoning, and alcoholic liver disease among US non-Hispanic Whites with low education. Economists interpret these population-level trends to indicate that despair induced by financial stressors is a shared pathway to these causes of death. Although we now have the catchy term “deaths of despair,” we have yet to study its central empirical claim: that conceptually defined and empirically assessed “despair” is indeed a common pathway to several causes of death. At the level of the person, despair consists of cognitive, emotional, behavioral, and biological domains. Despair can also permeate social relationships, networks, institutions, and communities. Extant longitudinal data sets feature repeated measures of despair—before, during, and after the Great Recession—offering resources to test the role that despair induced by economic decline plays in premature morbidity and mortality. Such tests must also focus on protective factors that could shield individuals. Deaths of despair is more than a phrase; it constitutes a hypothesis that deserves conceptual mapping and empirical study with longitudinal, multilevel data.
Journal Article
Promises and Pitfalls of Using Digital Traces for Demographic Research
The digital traces that we leave online are increasingly fruitful sources of data for social scientists, including those interested in demographic research. The collection and use of digital data also presents numerous statistical, computational, and ethical challenges, motivating the development of new research approaches to address these burgeoning issues. In this article, we argue that researchers with formal training in demography—those who have a history of developing innovative approaches to using challenging data—are well positioned to contribute to this area of work. We discuss the benefits and challenges of using digital trace data for social and demographic research, and we review examples of current demographic literature that creatively use digital trace data to study processes related to fertility, mortality, and migration. Focusing on Facebook data for advertisers—a novel \"digital census\" that has largely been untapped by demographers—we provide illustrative and empirical examples of how demographic researchers can manage issues such as bias and representation when using digital trace data. We conclude by offering our perspective on the road ahead regarding demography and its role in the data revolution.
Journal Article
Age and COVID-19 mortality
Demographers have emphasized the importance of age in explaining the spread of COVID-19 and its impact on mortality. However, the relationship between COVID-19 mortality and age should be contextualized in relation to other causes of death. To compare the age pattern of COVID-19 mortality with other causes of death and across countries, and to use these regularities to impute age-specific death counts in countries with limited data. The COVID-19 mortality doubling time in a Gompertz context was compared with 65 major causes of death using US vital statistics. COVID-19 fatality doubling time was similarly compared across 27 countries and used for estimating death counts by age in Israel as a case in point. First, COVID-19 mortality increases exponentially with age at a Gompertz rate near the median of aging-related causes of death, as well as pneumonia and influenza. Second, COVID-19 mortality levels are 2.8 to 8.2 times higher than pneumonia and influenza across the adult age range. Third, the relationship between both COVID-19 mortality and fatality and age varies considerably across countries. The increase in COVID-19 mortality with age resembles the population rate of aging. Country differences in the age pattern of COVID-19 mortality and fatality may point to differences in underlying population health, standards of clinical care, or data quality.
Journal Article
Demographic perspectives in research on global environmental change
The human population is at the centre of research on global environmental change. On the one hand, population dynamics influence the environment and the global climate system through consumption-based carbon emissions. On the other hand, the health and well-being of the population are already being affected by climate change. A knowledge of population dynamics and population heterogeneity is thus fundamental to improving our understanding of how population size, composition, and distribution influence global environmental change and how these changes affect population subgroups differentially by demographic characteristics and spatial distribution. The increasing relevance of demographic research on the topic, coupled with availability of theoretical concepts and advancement in data and computing facilities, has contributed to growing engagement of demographers in this field. In the past 25 years, demographic research has enriched climate change research-with the key contribution being in moving beyond the narrow view that population matters only in terms of population size-by putting a greater emphasis on population composition and distribution, through presenting both empirical evidence and advanced population forecasting to account for demographic and spatial heterogeneity. What remains missing in the literature is research that investigates how global environmental change affects current and future demographic processes and, consequently, population trends. If global environmental change does influence fertility, mortality, and migration, then population estimates and forecasts need to adjust for climate feedback in population projections. Indisputably, this is the area of new research that directly requires expertise in population science and contribution from demographers.
Journal Article
Demographic Trends in the United States: A Review of Research in the 2000s
Demographic trends in the 2000s showed the continuing separation of family and household because of factors such as childbearing among single parents, the dissolution of cohabiting unions, divorce, repartner ing, and remarriage. The transnational families of many immigrants also displayed this separation, as families extended across borders. In addition, demographers demonstrated during the decade that trends such as marriage and divorce were diverging according to education. Moreover, demographic trends in the age structure of the population showed that a large increase in the elderly population will occur in the 2010s. Overall, demographic trends produced an increased complexity of family life and a more ambiguous and fluid set of categories than demographers are accustomed to measuring.
Journal Article