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Recent Publications | Working Papers
Madhavan, Sangeetha and Enid J. Schatz.. "Coping with change: Household structure and composition in rural South Africa, 1992 - 2003." Scandinavian Journal of Public Health 35, no. S69 (2007): 85–93.
Abstract: Aim: To describe household change over a 10-year period of tremendous social, political, economic and health transformation in South Africa using data from the Agincourt health and demographic surveillance system in the rural northeast of South Africa. Methods: Examination of household structure and composition at three points: 1992, 1997, and 2003. These three years loosely represent conditions immediately before the elections (1992), short term post-elections (1997), and longer term (2003), and span a period of notable increase in HIV prevalence. Results: Average household size decreased and the proportion headed by females increased. The within-household dependency ratios for children and elders both decreased, as did the proportion of households containing foster children. The proportion with at least one maternal orphan doubled, but was still relatively small at 5.5%. Conclusions: This analysis is a starting point for future investigations aimed at explaining how HIV/AIDS and other sociocultural changes post-apartheid have impacted on household organization. The analysis shows both consistency and change in measures of household structure and composition between 1992 and 2003. The changes do not include an increase in various types of "fragile families", such as child-headed or skipped-generation households that might be expected due to HIV/AIDS.
Enid J. Schatz. "Taking care of my own blood": Older women's relationships to their households in rural South Africa." Scandinavian Journal of Public Health 35, no. S69 (2007): 147 - 154.
Abstract: Aim: This paper examines financial, emotional, and physical responsibilities elderly women are being asked to take on due to the incapacity of their adult children to care for the next generation; such incapacity is likely to increase as the HIV/AIDS epidemic worsens. Methods: This paper combines quantitative and qualitative data. Census data from the Agincourt health and demographic surveillance system (AHDSS) describe the presence of the elderly (specifically women over the age of 60 and men over the age of 65) in households in the Agincourt study site. Semi-structured interviews with 30 female residents aged 60-75 complement the census data by exploring the roles that older women, in particular, are playing in their households. Results: An elderly man and/or woman lives in 27.6% of households; 86% of elders live with non-elders. Households with a woman over the age of 60 resident (as opposed to those without) are twice as likely to have a fostered child living in the household and three times as likely to have an orphaned child in the household. Elderly women face financial, physical, and emotional burdens related to the morbidity and mortality of their adult children, and to caring for grandchildren left behind due to adult children's mortality, migration, (re)marriage, and unemployment. Conclusions: Older women provide crucial financial, physical, and emotional support for ill adult children and fostered and orphaned grandchildren in their households. As more prime-aged adults suffer from HIV/AIDS-related morbidity and mortality, these obligations are likely to increase.
Schatz, Enid J. and Catherine Ogunmefun. "Caring and Contributing: The Role of Older Women in Rural South African Multi-generational Households in the HIV/AIDS Era." World Development 35, no. 8 (2007): 1390-1403.
Abstract: This paper explores households’ coping strategies in rural South Africa, where HIV/AIDS morbidity and mortality are having profound effects on household resources. Older women’s pensions play a potentially crucial role in multi-generational households during crises and for day-to-day subsistence. We conducted semi-structured interviews with 30 elderly women from the MRC/Wits Rural Public Health and Health Transitions Research Unit (Agincourt) fieldsite, who were eligible for the South African non-contributory pension. Although we stratified our sample by household mortality experience, the area’s high levels of migration, unemployment, and HIV/AIDS prevalence made our respondents’ pensions an important, regular, and reliable source of household-income regardless of their households’ mortality profile.
Benzler, Justus and Samuel J. Clark. "Toward a Unified Timestamp with explicit precision." Demographic Research 12, no. 6 (2005):107-140.
Abstract: Demographic and health surveillance (DS) systems monitor and document individual- and group-level processes in well-defined populations over long periods of time. The resulting data are complex and inherently temporal. Established methods of storing and manipulating temporal data are unable to adequately address the challenges posed by these data. Building on existing standards, a temporal framework and notation are presented that are able to faithfully record all of the time-related information (or partial lack thereof) produced by surveillance systems. The Unified Timestamp isolates all of the inherent complexity of temporal data into a single data type and provides the foundation on which a Unified Timestamp class can be built. The Unified Timestamp accommodates both point- and interval-based time measures with arbitrary precision, including temporal sets. Arbitrary granularities and calendars are supported, and the Unified Timestamp is hierarchically organized, allowing it to represent an unlimited array of temporal entities.
Kuhn, Randall. "A Longitudinal Analysis of Health and Mortality in a Migrant-Sending Region of Bangladesh." In Migration and Health in Asia, edited by Santosh Jatrana, Mika Toyota, and Brenda S.A. Yeoh. London: Routledge, 2005.
Abstract: Twelve specialist essays explore health aspects of the migration of workers which is now an established feature of Asia's socio-economy. The matters addressed include: implications for the spread of Aids in Indonesia; relocation of the Akha people in Northwest Laos; foreign labour migrants and SARS in Singapore; role of nativity in Singapore's elder-health; maternal anaemia in the Visayas, the Philippines; Filipinos in Sabah; migration differentials in healthcare in Japan; migration and health within China; migrant-sending area's health in Bangladesh; reproductive health of wives of out-migrants in Bihar. The final papers draw general conclusions very useful to policy planners and administrators as well as to those directly concerned with health matters. With bibliography and index.
Kuhn, Randall, and Steven Stillman. "Understanding Interhousehold Transfers in a Transition Economy: Evidence from Russia." Economic Development and Cultural Change 53, no. 1 (2004): 131-56.
Abstract: This paper uses data from the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey (RLMS) to describe and model the determinants of interhousehold transfers. Russian households have experienced large reductions in income during the transition period, with a particularly severe decline occurring in the fall of 1998. Russia is experiencing a most unique pattern of aging. Sharply declining fertility, increasing mortality, and past demographic catastrophes (the two World Wars and the famine of the 1930’s) has left a population which is both young (few elderly) and old (one of the oldest working-age populations in the world). While Russia’s economic institutions and social safety net are underdeveloped, the typical household structure closely resembles that found in wealthier countries. Although it is typically assumed that the elderly in Russia are a highly vulnerable economic group, we actually find that transfers flow strongly from the elderly to their children, who are typically in the early part of the life-course and often have young children. This is especially true for the elderly in rural areas and those in extended families. While households with higher longer-term resources receive on net more transfers, we also find strong evidence that transfers respond to economic needs (i.e. transitory fluctuations in resources).
Frankenberg, Elizabeth, and Randall Kuhn. "The Role of Social Context in Shaping Intergenerational Relations in Indonesia and Bangladesh." In Intergenerational Relations across Time and Place: Annual Review of Gerontology and Geriatrics, edited by M. Silverstein. New York: Springer, 2004.
Krueger, P. M., R. G. Rogers, R. A. Hummer, and J. D. Boardman. "Body Mass, Smoking, and Overall and Cause-Specific Mortality among Older Us Adults." Research on Aging 26, no. 1 (2004): 82-107.
Abstract: The authors examine the relationships between body mass, smoking, and overall and cause-specific mortality among U.S. adults aged 60 and older, using data from the National Health Interview Survey linked to the Multiple Cause of Death file and Cox proportional hazard models. The authors find that, compared to those who are normal weight, obese individuals have higher risks of overall, circulatory disease, and diabetes mortality. Furthermore, smoking status suppresses the relationships between obesity and overall, circulatory disease, and cancer mortality, and interacts with low body weight to increase mortality risks. Finally, underweight individuals initially face increased risks of death over the follow-up period, although over time their mortality risks diminish to those of normal-weight individuals, likely due to the presence of unobserved illness. Researchers and health practitioners must account for smoking status, body mass, and specific causes of death to understand and improve the health of our increasingly obese elderly population.
Denney, Justin T., Patrick M. Krueger, Richard G. Rogers, and Jason D. Boardman. "Race/Ethnic and Sex Differentials in Body Mass among US Adults." Ethnicity & Disease 14, no. 3 (2004): 389-98.
Abstract: Current research incompletely documents race/ethnic and sex disparities in body mass, especially at the national level. Data from the 2000 National Health Interview Survey, Sample Adult File, are used to examine overall and sex-specific disparities in body mass for non-Hispanic Whites, non-Hispanic Blacks, Native Americans, Asian Americans, Puerto Ricans, Mexican Americans, and Cuban Americans. Two complementary multivariate regression techniques, ordinary least squares and multinomial logistic, are employed to control for important confounding factors. We found significantly higher body masses for non-Hispanic Blacks, Native Americans, Puerto Ricans, and Mexican Americans, compared to non-Hispanic Whites. Among very obese individuals, these relationships were more pronounced for females. Given the known health consequences associated with overweight and obesity, and recent trends toward increasing body mass in the United States, these findings underscore the need for public health policies that target specific subpopulations, in order to close the wide disparities in body mass in the United States.
Silvey, Rachel. "A Wrench in the Global Works: Anti-Sweatshop Activism on Campus." Antipode 36, no. 2 (2004): 191-97.
Abstract: When students galvanized anti-sweatshop activism on US and Canadian university campuses in the late 1990s, their actions struck at the core of recent debates about the geographies of counter-hegemonic politics (Blunt and Wills 2000; Herod and Wright 2002; Miller 2000; Sharp et al 2000; Traub-Werner and Cravey 2002). Students staged rallies and sit-ins to challenge their universities’ complicity with the corporate exploitation and abuse of low-wage workers in factories overseas. They directed attention to the embeddedness of academic institutions in the systems that perpetuate global economic inequality, and signaled the re-emergence of students as vocal, vibrant political actors. Observers have celebrated the anti-sweatshop movement’s capacity to build transnational alliances across difference, influence the shape of labor internationalism, link distant nodes in regimes of accumulation, and in some cases even jump scale from the grassroots to international regulatory institutions. Indeed, the movement is cause for optimism among geographers who seek new approaches to the injustices wrought by neoliberal globalization.
Silvey, Rachel. "Transnational Migration and the Gender Politics of Scale: Indonesian Domestic Workers in Saudi Arabia, 1997-2000." Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 25, no. 2 (2004): 141-55.
Abstract: Recent research has begun to explore the dynamics of transnational migration from a feminist perspective, and studies of migrant domestic workers have played a prominent role in pushing forward this work. Emerging simultaneously, but largely separately, are explicit debates within geography about the politics of scale, the social construction of scale, and the gender dimensions of scale. This article develops an analysis of the gender politics of the production of scale, specifically, the ‘transnationalisation’ of Indonesian activist approaches to overseas migrant domestic workers' issues. Based on fieldwork in an Indonesian community in West Java that has recently become a sending area for migrants to Saudi Arabia and interviews with activists representing Indonesian migrant women, the article examines the various gender-specific ways in which migrant women's rights activists construct and deploy the scales of the body, the nation and the transnational. It argues that activist approaches to migrant domestic workers' rights and the ways in which activists mobilise migrant women's narratives represent sophisticated feminist theoretical approaches to scale. By identifying and exploring the scale theory embedded in activist strategies, the analysis highlights the imbrication of feminist theory with practice, and underscores activists' agency in producing the meanings of specific scales. In so doing, the article is aimed more broadly at elaborating the ambivalent relationship between feminist activism/theory and transnationalism.
Silvey, Rachel. "Power, Difference, and Mobility: Feminist Advances in Migration Studies." Progress in Human Geography 28, no. 4 (2004): 1-17.
Abstract: The feminist migration literature in geography has contributed to bringing several critical social theoretical themes to the forefront of migration studies. Specifically, feminists have foregrounded: the politics of scale, mobility as political process, questions of subjectivity/identity, and critical theorizations of space and place. This article provides an overview of the feminist migration literature organized around these themes. In addition, it argues that feminist migration studies can play a pivotal role in the on-going project of marrying materialist approaches to political-economy with those of critical social theorists.
Rogers, Andrei, and Lisa Jordan. "Estimating Migration Flows from Birthplace-Specific Population Stocks of Infants." Geographical Analysis 36, no. 1 (2004): 38-53.
Abstract: When adequate data on migration are unavailable, demographers infer such data indirectly, usually by turning to residual methods of estimating net migration. This paper sets out and illustrates an inferential method that uses population totals in the first age group of birthplace-specific counts of residents in each region of a multiregional system to indirectly infer the entire age schedule of directional age-specific migration flows. Specifically, it uses an estimate of infant migration that is afforded by a count of infants enumerated in a region other than their region of birth to infer all other age-specific migration flows. Since infants migrate with their parents, the migration propensities of both are correlated, and the general stability of the age profiles of migration schedules then allows the association to be extended to all other age groups.
Krueger, Patrick M., Richard G. Rogers, Cristobal Ridao-Cano, and R. A. Hummer. "To Help or to Harm? Food Stamp Receipt and Mortality Risk Prior to the 1996 Welfare Reform Act." Social Forces 82, no. 4 (2004): 1573-99.
Abstract: The authors use data from the National Health Interview Survey-Family Resources Supplement to examine the relationship between Food Stamp receipt and prospective adult mortality, among eligible households. They specify a switching probit model to adjust for observed and unobserved factors that correlate with selection into the Food Stamp Program and mortality, and to estimate mortality under counterfactual conditions that we do not observe. The average individual, based on observed characteristics, has higher mortality when participating than when not participating. But due to unobserved differences between participants and nonparticipants, those who self-select into participation experience lower mortality than if they did not participate. Our findings suggest that Food Stamps provide an important safety net that protects the health of those who are most likely to participate.
Silvey, Rachel. "Transnational Domestication: State Power and Indonesian Migrant Women in Saudi Arabia." Political Geography 23, no. 3 (2004): 245-64.
Abstract: Recent efforts to elaborate a feminist geopolitics have centered on challenging and expanding classical spatializations of "the political." Building on this growing body of work, this article explores the gender politics of state power as refracted in struggles over women’s transnational migration and domestic labor. Specifically, it analyzes the Indonesian and Saudi states’ involvement in shaping the migration and working conditions of Indonesian domestic servants employed in Saudi Arabia. It examines key aspects of both states’ direct and indirect influences on the feminization of the migrant labor force, the limitations of their policies for protecting overseas migrant women, and the political strategies that activists are employing to broaden the states’ spaces and scales of jurisdiction. It points up gender-specific limits to the internationalization of state labor regulation, as well as possibilities that NGOs have identified for improving the protection of migrant workers in this transnational context. It thus identifies some particular ways in which contestations around women’s transnational labor migration and gendered constructions of domestic labor are interlinked with the changing geographies of state power.
Entries in The SAGE Encyclopedia of Social Science Research Methods, 2004 (Vol. 3). M. S. Lewis-Beck, A. E. Bryman, & T. F. Liao (Eds.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Kuhn, Randall
"Stable Population Model"
Little, Jani S.
"Goodness of Fit Measures"
"Logarithms"
"Nonlinearity"
"Standard Error"
Pampel, Fred
"Exploratory Data Analysis"
Abstract: Each entry is written by a leading authority in the field, covering both quantitative and qualitative methods. This unique multi-volume reference set offers readers an all-encompassing education in the ways of social science researchers. Written to be accessible to general readers, entries do not require any advanced knowledge or experience to understand the purposes and basic principles of any of the methods. The Encyclopedia features two major types of entries: definitions, consisting of a paragraph or two, provide a quick explanation of a methodological term; and topical treatments or essays discussing the nature, history, application/example and implication of using a certain method.
