Seminar Series

"Assessing the Significance of Period and Cohort Effects in Hierarchical Age-Period-Cohort Models, with Applications to Trends in Verbal Ability, Voting in Presidential Elections, and Health" The Duke Population Research Institute (DuPRI), an affiliate of SSRI, is dedicated to the conceptual unification of the demographic sciences. We host a regular Thursday afternoon speaker series presenting innovative research during the academic year that all members of the Duke community are invited to attend.

Come by and learn more about DuPRI. We'll discuss successes over the summer and future plans for DuPRI. We would also like to discuss our R24 application, now in preparation.

ABSTRACT: How does life improve and/or worsen with age? On the one hand, there is a rich gerontological literature that documents age-related declines in objective components of life quality, such as health and wealth. On the other hand, the relationship between age and subjective well-being (SWB) is relatively unknown. For example, how is SWB distributed across age, across society over time, and across birth cohorts?

The Cebu Longitudinal Health and Nutrition Survey (CLHNS) is a multi-purpose pregnancy and birth cohort study that has now spanned more than 3 decades. Conducted by a multidisciplinary team of researchers from the US and the Philippines, the CLHNS has followed a cohort of Filipino women who gave birth between May 1, 1983, and April 30, 1984. The CLHNS was designed with the Mosely and Chen health determinants framework as an anchoring theoretical perspective.

This paper reports on an extension of group-based trajectory modeling to address non-random subject attrition or truncation due to death that varies across trajectory groups. The effects of the model extension are explored in both simulated and real data. The analyses of simulated data establish that estimates of trajectory group size as measured by group membership probabilities can be badly biased by differential attrition rates across groups if the groups are initially not well separated.

We have demonstrated a close match between self-reported race and bio-ancestry estimated from survey responses and 162 genetic ancestral informative markers drawn from 2,065 racially and ethnically diverse U.S. college students. Allowing each individual to belong to one and only one ancestral population, 99.3%, 94.7%, and 97.7% of self-reported whites, blacks, and East Asians, respectively, were classified into the white, black, and East Asian categories.

This paper uses newly-released data from 2008 American Community Survey (ACS), along with the similar microdata from the 1980 decennial census, to examine recent changes in interracial marriage. The 1980-2008 period brought rapid increases in interracial marriage between whites and African Americans, slower increases in observed marriages between whites and Hispanics, and an end to the long-term rise in marriages between whites and both Asian Americans and American Indians. Marriages between natives and the foreign-born, however, increased dramatically over 2000-2008, especially among U.S.

A growing body of research highlights that in-utero conditions are consequential for individual outcomes throughout the life cycle, but research assessing causal processes is scarce. This paper examines the effect of one such condition "prenatal maternal stress" on birthweight, an early outcome shown to affect cognitive, educational, and socioeconomic attainment later in life.

DuPRI Seminar Kick-Off. Reception to announce upcoming seminars which will allow the Duke community to hear cutting edge research from renowned scholars and will serve as a forum for interdisciplinary exchanges.

We studied the relationship between early life socioeconomic status, household structure and adult all cause and cause-specific mortality in Finland among cohorts born in 1936-1950. We found significant associations between early life social and family conditions on all cause mortality as well as mortality from cardiovascular diseases, lung cancer and alcohol related diseases, accidents and violence, with protective effects of higher childhood SES varying between 10% and 30%.