Mortality of the Orthodox Adult Population in Ekaterinburg during the Late 19th and Early 20th Centuries

Traditionally, studies of historical mortality have focused on the national, regional, or local levels. Currently, the creation of individual level databases has made it possible to study mortality at the individual and family levels, also following people over generations. However, this research rarely considered non-family relations; at the same time, rapid urbanisation during the late nineteenth century severed many family ties and hindered the transmission of traditional models for demographic behaviour. Thus, the role of non-family factors increased, the main of which was the church parish, which since the end of the nineteenth century gradually transformed into a neighborhood community — the prototype of the urban microdistrict. This research aims to study the mortality of the adult population of Ekaterinburg during the decades around 1900, differentiating between the parishes of the Russian Orthodox Church. The sources consist of official statistics and the Ural Population Project database, which was created based on the metric (church) books. The authors reconstruct the full development of mortality for each parish and for Ekaterinburg as a whole; map the structure of mortality, calculate the average age at death, as well as analyse the causes of death and its seasonality. As a result, it may be concluded that each of the five Orthodox parishes indeed had a certain demographic specificity. Mortality was influenced by the economic profile of the area and the trend of urban development, where the location of social facilities on the territory of each parish was of great importance.

Childbearing: Re-production or Creation

The assisted reproduction possibilities, enhanced by the technology of gene editing, are considered in the context of the demographic trend to rationalize childbearing, expressed in the formula “a desired child at a desired time”. Applying of gene editing in human embryos illustrates the transition from quantitative measurements of procreation to the choice of the child "quality". The gene editing in the human embryo is presented as a consistent development of technological interventions into the area of human reproduction, it acts as a link in the expansion of implementation of the preimplantation diagnosis (PGD) of embryos method. When in the case of PGD the main purpose was selection, then nowadays it becomes possible to combine the selection of embryos with the modification of the genetic structure. The participation of geneticists in artificial reproduction increases the efficiency of IVF cycles and at the same time enhances the technological prosthetics of the childbearing process. Following the increase of supply in artificial reproduction, it becomes possible not just to plan a pregnancy, but also to control genetic bases that are still beyond human control, but also to determine the characteristics of an unborn child. A new anthropological situation of displacement or substitution of the value aspects of procreation, understood as procreation, i.e. a human creation, by reproduction - the production, the construction of an ability to give birth to a child first and then the children themselves. As a result, the meanings of childbearing are transformed, the reproductive attitudes and parents' intentions change. Arguments in discussions about the admissibility of intervention with the embryonic genome reflect contradictions in understanding the value of natural foundations in human birth, which are presented in procreation and reproduction opposition. An orientation towards the “quality” of children in social terms has its maintain in a transformation of family ties, in a values shift of kinship and parenthood. Thus, the gene-editing of the embryo enhances two tendencies in demographic behaviour: concern for the child “quality”, which entails eugenic consequences, and a constructive and technological trend in reproduction that threatening the natural foundations of procreation.

From Matched Certificates to Related Persons

For the Netherlands, a rich new data source has become available which contains indexed civil certificates for multiple generations of individuals: LINKS. The current version of the dataset contains information on 1.7 million demographic events for the province of Zeeland in the 19th and early 20th centuries and will be extended to other provinces in the Netherlands in the near future. To be able to study demographic behaviour, life courses and family relations need to be reconstructed from the civil certificates. This paper describes the steps that are taken to move from the LINKS database, which contains digitised birth, marriage, and death certificates and relational information between individuals on these certificates, to LINKS-gen, which contains over six hundred thousand life courses, family reconstructions for up to seven generations, and fertility, marital, mortality, and occupational status information, ready for analysis. We present procedures for variable construction and data cleaning. Furthermore, we give a short overview of the LINKS database, discuss quality checks, and give advice on selection of relevant cases necessary to move from LINKS to LINKS-gen. The paper is accompanied by R-scripts to convert and construct the datafiles.

Historical Chinese Microdata. 40 Years of Dataset Construction by the Lee-Campbell Research Group

The Lee-Campbell Group has spent forty years constructing and analysing individual-level datasets based largely on Chinese archival materials to produce a scholarship of discovery. Initially, we constructed datasets for the study of Chinese demographic behaviour, households, kin networks, and socioeconomic attainment. More recently, we have turned to the construction and analysis of datasets on civil and military officials and other educational and professional elites, especially their social origins and their careers. As of July 2020, the datasets include nominative information on the behaviour and life outcomes of approximately two million individuals. This article is a retrospective on the construction of these datasets and a summary of their findings. This is the first time we have presented all our projects together and discussed them and the results of our analysis as a single integrated whole. We begin by summarizing the contents, organization, and notable features of each dataset and provide an integrated history of our data construction, starting in 1979 up to the present. We then summarize the most important results from our research on demographic behaviour, family, and household organization, and more recently inequality and stratification. We conclude with a reflection on the importance of data discovery, flexibility, interaction and collaboration to the success of our efforts.

Welfare and demography in the time of Malthus. Regional and local variations in poor relief and population developments in Flanders, c. 1750-1810

Flanders represents a particularly interesting region for research that aims to investigate the development of socio-economic inequalities at the local and regional level. The relationship between and effects of structural socio-economic characteristics on the one hand and micro-level variations on the other hand remain unclear. The data collected by the STREAM project (streamproject.ugent.be) together with its tailored geographical information system (GIS) allow us to explore these relationships for the rural parishes of early modern Flanders. In this chapter we examine spatial patterns in poor relief and demographic behaviour and how these were interrelated.

Editorial on the Special Issue “New Aspects on Migrant Populations in Europe: Norms, Attitudes and Intentions in Fertility and Family Planning”

This paper reviews the most recent literature on the fertility of migrant populations in Europe. In a systematic review of 21 peer-reviewed journals, we found that the literature has focused almost exclusively on actual behaviours related to the quantum and timing of births; it primarily investigates the determinants of demographic behaviour related to the structural integration of migrants. Previous literature on the demographic behaviour of migrants in Europe used factors related to culture more as a residual explanation for group differences, but it barely addressed their role specifically. The aim of our Special Issue is to draw attention to the normative side of fertility and to include aspects of reproductive health and family planning in the picture – both aspects are related to culture. This paper includes a short introduction to the articles contained in this Special Issue and proposes recommendations for future research.

Grandparents and great-grandparents in Estonian population

The paper estimates the probability of living until the age of a grandparent and a great-grandparent in different cohorts of Estonian population. The objects of comparison are men and women born in 1939, 1959, 1989 and nowadays (2016). It turned out that (assuming the stability of demographic behaviour) people born in 1989 have the highest probability to see the grandchildren and also great-grandchildren. In the case of people born in 21st century, the probability is going down in spite of increasing life expectancy. The reason for this feature is massive postponing of family creation.

8. Population pyramids and projections

‘Population pyramids and projections’ describes a key concept within demography—the population pyramid. The age pyramid represents the distribution of a population by age and sex. It comprises a pair of bar graphs joined in the centre and traditionally resembling an Egyptian pyramid. The vertical axis records age, with young at the base and old at the top, and the bars coming off the axis to the right represent females and to the left males. The demographic behaviour of individuals is affected by their age, the time period in which they are living, and their shared cohort experience. Different methods of population projections to foresee population futures are also outlined.

Evolutionary demography of age at last birth: integrating approaches from human behavioural ecology and cultural evolution

Cultural evolutionary theory and human behavioural ecology offer different, but compatible approaches to understanding human demographic behaviour. For much of their 30 history, these approaches have been deployed in parallel, with few explicit attempts to integrate them empirically. In this paper, we test hypotheses drawn from both approaches to explore how reproductive behaviour responds to cultural changes among Mosuo agriculturalists of China. Specifically, we focus on how age at last birth (ALB) varies in association with temporal shifts in fertility policies, spatial variation and kinship ecologies. We interpret temporal declines in ALB as plausibly consistent with demographic front-loading of reproduction in light of fertility constraints and later ages at last birth in matrilineal populations relative to patrilineal ones as consistent with greater household cooperation for reproductive purposes in the former. We find little evidence suggesting specific transmission pathways for the spread of norms regulating ALB, but emphasize that the rapid pace of change strongly suggests that learning processes were involved in the general decline in ALB over time. The different predictions of models we employ belie their considerable overlap and the potential for a synthetic approach to generate more refined tests of evolutionary hypotheses of demographic behaviour. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Bridging cultural gaps: interdisciplinary studies in human cultural evolution’.