Office Of Population Research Research Articles

30 Years of Women's Health Issues

Thirty years after the launch of Women's Health Issues, it is without question that great progress has been made towards the health and well-being of women. In his introduction to the first issue of Women's Health Issues, founding editor Warren H. Pearse noted that a combination of advances in medical science and changes in expectations about reproduction and work were reshaping women's health care and their lives (Pearse, 1990Pearse W.H. Apologia.Women's Health Issues. 1990; 1: 1Abstract Full Text PDF Google Scholar). Three decades later, medical science and social forces continue to influence women's opportunities to live healthy lives and exercise autonomy. Women's Health Issues has published more than 1500 research and policy studies to ensure an evolving, socio-ecological, and thoughtful narrative around key women's health challenges and disparities, including reproductive health, maternal mortality, chronic disease, cancer, mental health, and gender-based violence. Women's Health Issues was founded during the surge of women's health advocacy and research in the United States that resulted in an expanded agenda for interdisciplinary women's health research, unprecedented US policy initiatives in women's health, and a growing awareness that women's health as a field covers more than reproductive issues and more than clinical care. The journal itself grew and expanded its content and reach along with these trends. Today the journal continues to move the field forward by publishing rigorous research and commentaries addressing key issues that contribute to the health and well-being of all women. In commentaries and research articles, Women's Health Issues authors have covered a wide array of topics and many different populations. The lists of honorees for our annual Charles E. Gibbs Leadership Prize (https://www.whijournal.com/content/Charles_E_Gibbs_Prize) and Editor's Choice (https://www.whijournal.com/content/whi-free-collection) showcase the wide range of topics our authors cover, as well as their skill at conveying why their research findings matter for women's health. As we look back over the last 30 years, the scientific, policy, and practice community must take a moment to applaud and celebrate many milestones in women's health and health care. We have witnessed significant advances, including the 2006 introduction of an HPV vaccine in the US, leading to a 56% decline in cervical precancer among those aged 18–20 and a 39% decline among those aged 21–24 (Gargano et al., 2019Gargano J.W. Park I.U. Griffin M.R. Niccolai L.M. Powell M. HPV-IMPACT Working GroupTrends in High-grade Cervical Lesions and Cervical Cancer Screening in 5 States, 2008-2015.Clinical Infectious Diseases. 2019; 68: 1282-1291Crossref PubMed Scopus (21) Google Scholar). Thirty years ago medication abortion was an aspiration; in 2000 the FDA approved Mifeprex, and now over one-third of abortions at 8 weeks' gestation or earlier are medication abortions (KFF, 2020KFFThe Availability and Use of Medication Abortion.https://www.kff.org/womens-health-policy/fact-sheet/the-availability-and-use-of-medication-abortion/Date: 2020Date accessed: November 20, 2020Google Scholar). Plan B emergency contraception was approved by the FDA in 1999; after years of high-quality science and advocacy, the FDA announced its decision to make Plan B available over-the-counter for women ages 18 and over in 2006, and then in 2013 that the Plan B pill would be made available for girls ages 15 and older without a prescription (Office of Population Research, 2020Office of Population ResearchHistory of Plan B OTC.https://ec.princeton.edu/pills/planbhistory.htmlDate: 2020Date accessed: November 23, 2020Google Scholar). In 2008, the Turnaway Study, a prospective longitudinal study examining the effects of unintended pregnancy on women's lives, changed the narrative of unintended pregnancies and abortion by filling critical gaps in what we know about the short- and long-term consequences of being denied a wanted abortion (Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health, 2020Advancing New Standards in Reproductive HealthThe Turnaway Study.https://turnawaystudy.com/about/Date: 2020Date accessed: November 23, 2020Google Scholar). An important shift in women's health over the last three decades included uncovering an important truth: a woman's health involves more than just her reproductive capacity. The field expanded its definition and perspective of women's health in 1991 (shortly after the debut of Women's Health Issues) when one of the largest prevention studies, the Women's Health Initiative, launched with a $625 million grant from the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (Women's Health Initiative, 2020Women's Health InitiativeWomen's Health Initiative: Changing the Future of Women's Health.https://www.whi.org/Date: 2020Date accessed: November 23, 2020Google Scholar). This landmark study continues today and has resulted in more than 1800 publications on aspects of U.S. women's health ranging from cancer to chronic disease. And more recently, our expanded research landscape around women's health has led to a new commitment towards recognizing, examining, and understanding sex and gender differences across all health behaviors and outcomes. A growing body of work demonstrates sex and gender differences in diagnosis, treatment, and health outcomes. The year Women's Health Issues launched, the Office of Research on Women's Health was established at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) (Office of Research on Women's Health,Office of Research on Women's HealthMission and History.https://orwh.od.nih.gov/about/mission-historyDate accessed: November 20, 2020Google Scholar), and the Congressionally mandated Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Office on Women's Health debuted in 1994 (U.S. Food and Drug Administration, 2019U.S. Food and Drug AdministrationOffice of Women's Health.https://www.fda.gov/about-fda/office-commissioner/office-womens-healthDate: 2019Date accessed: November 20, 2020Google Scholar). Both offices have played important roles in ensuring that research is more inclusive. For instance, the FDA revised its regulations for new drug applications in 1998 to require that manufacturers present effectiveness data by gender, age, and racial subgroups (Investigational New Drug Applications and New Drug Applications, 1998Investigational New Drug Applications and New Drug Applicationshttps://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-1998-02-11/pdf/98-3422.pdfDate: 1998Date accessed: November 20, 2020Google Scholar), and in 2014 updated requirements for what prescription drug information must disclose about potential effects for those who are pregnant or breastfeeding (Content and Format of Labeling for Human Prescription Drug and Biological Products; Requirements for Pregnancy and Lactation Labeling, 2014Content and Format of Labeling for Human Prescription Drug and Biological Products; Requirements for Pregnancy and Lactation Labeling.https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2014-12-04/pdf/2014-28241.pdfDate: 2014Date accessed: November 20, 2020Google Scholar). In 1994, the NIH issued its first guidelines on the inclusion of women and members of minoritized groups in clinical research (National Institutes of Health, 1994National Institutes of HealthNIH Guidelines on the Inclusion of Women and Minorities as Subjects in Clinical Research.https://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/notice-files/not94-100.htmlDate: 1994Google Scholar), and updated them in 2001 (National Institutes of Health, 2001National Institutes of HealthNIH Policy on Reporting Race and Ethnicity Data: Subjects in Clinical Research.https://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/notice-files/NOT-OD-01-053.htmlDate: 2001Date accessed: November 20, 2020Google Scholar) and 2017; the 21st Century Cures Act, signed into law in 2016, requires trials to report their results disaggregated by sex/gender and race/ethnicity in ClinicalTrials.gov (National Institutes of Health, 2017National Institutes of HealthAmendment: NIH Policy and Guidelines on the Inclusion of Women and Minorities as Subjects in Clinical Research.https://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/notice-files/NOT-OD-18-014.htmlDate: 2017Date accessed: November 20, 2020Google Scholar). The last three decades have been marked by significant changes in women's roles in the labor force, sparking research on how these changes affect the health and well-being of women. For example, as women have accounted for a growing share of the US veteran population, the Veterans Administration (VA) has supported a growing body of research into women veterans' health. Milestones include development of the first national VA Women's Health Research Agenda in 2004 (Yano et al., 2006Yano E.M. Bastian L.A. Frayne S.M. Howell A.L. Lipson L.R. McGlynn G. Schnurr P.P. Seaver M.R. Spungen A.M. Fihn S.D. Toward a VA Women's Health Research Agenda: setting evidence-based priorities to improve the health and health care of women veterans.Journal of General Internal Medicine. 2006; 21: S93-S101Crossref PubMed Scopus (68) Google Scholar) and the creation of the VA Women's Health Research Consortium in 2010 (Yano and Frayne, 2011Yano E.M. Frayne S.M. Health and Health Care of Women Veterans and Women in the Military: Research Informing Evidence-Based Practice and Policy.Women's Health Issues. 2011; 21: S64-S66Abstract Full Text Full Text PDF PubMed Scopus (4) Google Scholar). Many policies at the state and federal levels, and across multiple branches of government, have advanced women's health in the US, but none more so than the Affordable Care Act (ACA). The ACA, formally known as the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, was enacted by the 111th Congress and signed into law by President Barack Obama on March 23, 2010, and has advanced women's health by increasing access to health insurance and health care nationwide. The ACA expanded Medicaid, prohibited insurers from charging different premiums based on gender, and eliminated exclusions for pre-existing conditions. Further, the ACA improved women's health by requiring no-cost coverage of preventive services such as mammograms, well visits, contraception, and breastfeeding support. History will remember the last 30 years as a time of great progress for women. However, many old challenges remain, and new ones have emerged. The U.S. pregnancy-related deaths rate is far higher than that of other industrialized countries, and Black, American Indian, and Alaska Native women are 2–3 times more likely to die from pregnancy-related causes than White women (Petersen et al., 2019Petersen E.E. Davis N.L. Goodman D. Cox S. Syverson C. Barfield W. Racial/Ethnic Disparities in Pregnancy-Related Deaths-United States, 2007-2016.MMWR Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. 2019; 68: 762-765Crossref PubMed Scopus (135) Google Scholar). Although better access to highly effective contraceptive methods has helped many people exercise reproductive autonomy, almost half of all pregnancies in the United States are unintended (Finer and Zolna, 2016Finer L.B. Zolna M.R. Declines in unintended pregnancy in the United States, 2008–2011.New England Journal of Medicine. 2016; 374: 843-852Crossref PubMed Scopus (1038) Google Scholar) (though, as a growing body of research indicates, not intending to be pregnant is not synonymous with being unhappy about pregnancy). One in four women has been a victim of intimate partner violence in her lifetime, and more than 80% of these women report significant short- or long-term health impacts from this violence (Campbell, 2002Campbell J.C. Health consequences of intimate partner violence.Lancet. 2002; 359: 1331-1336Abstract Full Text Full Text PDF PubMed Scopus (2376) Google Scholar). Women are three times more likely to die following a heart attack compared to men (Alabas et al., 2017Alabas O.A. Gale C.P. Hall M. Rutherford M.J. Szummer K. Lawesson S.S. Jernberg T. Sex Differences in Treatments, Relative Survival, and Excess Mortality Following Acute Myocardial Infarction: National Cohort Study Using the SWEDEHEART Registry.Journal of the American Heart Association. 2017; 6: e007123Crossref PubMed Scopus (79) Google Scholar) and more than 1 in 5 women in the United States experienced a mental health condition such as depression or anxiety in the last year (Riecher-Rössler, 2017Riecher-Rössler A. Sex and gender differences in mental disorders.Lancet Psychiatry. 2017; 4: 8-9Abstract Full Text Full Text PDF PubMed Scopus (103) Google Scholar). In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic is exacerbating existing gender inequities. Women—especially Black and Latinx women—are disproportionately likely to work low-wage service jobs and are facing layoffs and reduced hours with already limited financial cushions. In ordinary times, US women spend 37 percent more time on unpaid care than men (U.S. Department of Labor, 2019U.S. Department of LaborAmerican Time Use Survey – 2018 Results.2019Google Scholar); now, with children home from school and new challenges for older adults who need assistance, women are struggling under competing demands and disproportionately likely to leave paid jobs because of caregiving responsibilities. In the United States, 75% of all healthcare jobs are held by women (U.S. Census Bureau, 2020U.S. Census BureauFull-Time, Year-Round Workers and Median Earnings: 2000 and 2013-2018.https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/industry-occupation/median-earnings.htmlDate: 2020Date accessed: November 23, 2020Google Scholar). They are our physicians, nurses, midwives, and community health workers, and are facing an elevated risk of COVID exposure while performing essential work for their communities. The year 2020 is also the year we lost one of our greatest women's health advocates, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg. She was a powerful voice on the Supreme Court of the United States and her court opinions replaced long-existing stereotypes about women's physical and mental vulnerabilities with an evidence-based understanding of women's lives. Her pivotal work emphasized laws' impacts on women's health and the ways in which women's health is tied to their economic opportunities and ability to achieve equity. Without her presence on the Court, we face an uncertain outcome in pending cases addressing reproductive rights and the future of the ACA. Although the health of women in the US has improved since the launch of Women's Health Issues, not all women have benefited equally. Inequities by race, ethnicity, immigration status, age, disability, geographic location, sexual orientation, and gender identity reflect both structural inequities and the bias and discrimination that individuals encounter as they seek health care and go about their lives. In the field of women's health, we must acknowledge both the intersecting forms of oppression that shape the experiences of women with multiple marginalized identities and the fact that cisgender women are not the only ones who need “women's health” care and research. The Affordable Care Act has brought greater access to health care to many underserved individuals, including women, but achieving health equity will require overhauling policies, institutional practices, and individual behaviors—all while following the leadership of those who experience the harms of inequities and know how to achieve just outcomes (Barlow and Johnson,Barlow J.N. Johnson B.M. Listen to Black Women: Do Black Feminist and Womanist Health Policy Analyses.Women's Health Issues. 2020; (Epub ahead print)https://doi.org/10.1016/j.whi.2020.11.001Abstract Full Text Full Text PDF PubMed Scopus (3) Google Scholar). Over the next 30 years, researchers will develop new interventions, advocates will shape public opinion and policies, public officials will adopt laws and regulations, and courts will uphold them or strike them down. As women determine the course of their lives, myriad forces will shape their opportunities to achieve health and autonomy. Women's Health Issues will remain committed to publishing and disseminating research on the effects and opportunities of changes in medical care, policies, and social forces, and prioritize publications that advance equity. Our ability to publish high-quality research relevant to women's lives depends upon contributions from a long list of collaborators. Our authors, peer reviewers, editorial board members, publishing colleagues, staff, and readers all play essential roles in our success, and we offer all of you our sincere thanks. We close as Warren Pearse did in this journal's first issue: “To you all, good reading, good writing, and clear thinking.”

A Digital History of Anglophone Demography and Global Population Control, 1915–1984

The world's population grew dramatically in the twentieth century, rising from about 1.6 billion in 1900 to just over 6 billion in 2000, with 75 percent of that growth occurring after 1950. As population grew, it became the subject of a new science, demography, and the target of numerous interventions aimed at limiting its growth. While histories of global population have suggested that demography was integral to the creation of fertility control policies and programs (Connelly 2008; Hoff 2012; Robertson 2012; Bashford 2014), only a handful have explicitly examined this relationship (Hodgson 1988; Demeny 1988; Szreter 1993; Greenhalgh 1996). Demography and population control were in fact co-produced and deeply imbricated with each other in the twentieth century: as policymakers increasingly turned to scientific expertise for guidance and authority (Porter 1995), advocates of fertility control drew heavily on demography to track population growth and to justify intervention (Demeny 1988). But that is only the beginning of the story. Reading the twentieth-century demography journal literature alongside the archives of the scientists who wrote it and the individuals and organizations that sponsored them indicates that American advocates of population control also provided the funding and institutional support that established demography as an interdisciplinary scientific field in the 1920s and 1930s and that stimulated its enormous growth after World War II, both in the United States and elsewhere. Through direct patronage, projects aimed at limiting fertility gave rise to the science that guided and legitimized them. Historians of science have long recognized patronage as a critical component of scientific activity because of the substantial costs associated with the demands of research and dissemination of ideas (Biagioli 1990; Coben 1976; Findlen 1993; Shapin 1974). The institutions that cover the costs also exert influence over which research questions get asked and which methods investigators employ to answer them. To the extent that funding agencies use the results of science to make policy recommendations or to determine future grants, they provide what Bruno Latour (1987) calls “positive modalities”: citations of scientific claims that move those claims “downstream” toward general acceptance as fact. In the case of demography, I will argue that patrons also moved their own potentially controversial projects downstream toward public and policy acceptance through the science they funded. An older literature examining private patronage for the social sciences in the United States between the world wars (Fisher 1993; Lagemann 1992; O'Connor 2007) and a newer literature exploring government funding for the social sciences in the second half of the twentieth century (Rohde 2013; Solovey 2013) have both drawn attention to this cyclical relationship of legitimation. The more recent literature demonstrates, moreover, that the geopolitical exigencies of the Cold War prompted massive government funding for the social sciences and directed their research toward defense and national security, as was the case also in the natural and physical sciences. The history of demography in the United States spans the interwar and postwar periods and bridges the divide between private and public patronage for the human and social sciences. As I will argue here, the philanthropies that funded demography in the first half of the century played a critical role in securing government funding in the later period. Within scientific fields, communities of practice tend to be bounded by language (Gordin 2015), and demography is no exception. Demographers will notice a parallel with fertility regimes, which map onto linguistic borders (Coale and Watkins 1986). I focus here on anglophone demography, as the English-language demography literature is the largest, has the broadest geographic reach, and has historically had the closest ties to global population control organizations. Francophone demography, by contrast, developed in distinct institutional and political settings. Its primary sponsor was the pronatalist French government, and comparative research has demonstrated that francophone demography has long emphasized problems of low fertility in contrast to the emphasis on high fertility in anglophone demography (Marshall 2013, 2015). By the mid-twentieth century, most demographic research was published in either English or French. Among anglophone demographers, this article focuses on US-based actors for three reasons. First, although demography was an active field of research in Europe between the wars and globally after World War II, the majority of English-language articles were written by scientists either based or trained in the United States. Second, the lion's share of funding for anglophone demography worldwide, both between and after the wars, came from US sources. Finally, US philanthropies and later the US government were the largest sponsors of birth control worldwide in the twentieth century, funding research and family planning programs in many parts of the world and promoting the development of population policy at national and international levels (Connelly 2008; Caldwell and Caldwell 1986; Donaldson 1990; Harkavy 1995). Therefore, the history of anglophone demography is both a global history and a US history: the US-based actors I discuss were at the center of global scientific, philanthropic, and policy networks. This article combines archival research into the institutional arrangements of twentieth-century demography with computational analysis of the content of anglophone demography journals. I use institutional archives to describe how demography coalesced between the world wars when population-oriented scientists in a variety of fields attracted patronage from individuals and organizations in the United States that sought to engineer the domestic population through eugenics, birth control legalization, and immigration restriction. In the first few decades after World War II, archival sources indicate that the field grew dramatically, largely on the initiative of new and more powerful patrons who aimed to control global population through the promotion of family planning in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. I then use topic modeling, an algorithmic form of textual analysis, to assess how these institutional arrangements manifested themselves in the demographic literature. Results suggest that demographers began to take a distinctive and coherent approach to population research in the period before World War II that differed from the approach of other social scientists studying population and indicate that, both before and after the war, articles by demographers or in demography journals meshed with the concerns of the field's funders about fertility and how to control it to a greater extent than did population-oriented scholarship in the other social sciences. Together, archival research and computational textual analysis demonstrate that demography's patrons played a key role in the field's establishment and development, providing the financial support and institutional structure necessary for producing research that, in turn, informed patrons’ population projects, legitimized them in the eyes of the public, and put them on the policy agendas of the United States, the United Nations, and governments in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. To argue, as I do here, that demography's patrons helped to develop the field between the world wars is to contend that demography did not exist prior to the end of World War I. To be sure, governments have been collecting population data and using them to analyze vital processes since at least the seventeenth century (Emigh, Riley, and Ahmed 2016). Before the 1920s, however, this activity, known as “political arithmetic” or “vital statistics,” was an administrative, not a scientific one (Szreter 2015). By the 1920s, scientists had begun to analyze population data, but they did so as statisticians, biologists, sociologists, or economists; no one yet called him- or herself a “population scientist” or “demographer.”1 Demography emerged at the intersection of these fields in the late 1920s, when population-oriented practitioners of each one began to identify themselves and one another as members of a coherent field, first described as “population science” and later termed “demography.” In the United States, emergent population scholars included insurance actuaries Louis Dublin and Alfred Lotka, biologists Raymond Pearl and Lowell Reed, vital statisticians Walter Willcox and Frank Notestein, and sociologists Warren Thompson and William Ogburn. Despite their disparate fields, these men began to see their work turning on similar questions and drawing on similar methods to explore the dynamics of population. Their exchanges were facilitated by a small set of patrons, the most prominent being newspaper magnate Edward Scripps, the Milbank Memorial Fund, and the retired businessman Frederick Osborn. Between the wars, scientists and their patrons participated in political debates about populations that focused both on their size and on what contemporaries referred to as their “quality”: the relative balance between wealthy and poor, educated and uneducated, white and nonwhite, foreign-born and native-born (Lovett 2007; MacNamara 2014; Allen 1991; Schneider 1990; Soloway 1990). Advocates and opponents of the population projects of the time—birth control legalization, immigration restriction, and eugenics—debated the effects such programs would have on national populations, calling on the new and still largely inchoate field of “population science” for support (Hodgson 1991; Notestein and Osborn 1971). Scientists themselves entered these debates, marshaling analysis of population data to argue for or against various population-oriented political agendas (for example, Dublin and Lotka 1925; East 1923; Kuczynski 1928; Pearl 1940). Individuals and organizations that sought to harness the intellectual power of this emerging science to their own population agendas facilitated its coalescence by hiring demographers and underwriting the establishment of the institutions that would make their aspirational professional identity a reality: professional associations, journals, and university departments. Concerned about the geopolitical implications of population growth in East Asia, Edward Scripps established the first university-based population research center, the Scripps Foundation for Research in Population Problems, in 1922 at Miami University in Ohio (Payne 2005). He envisioned his foundation as a place where young scientists could devote themselves full time to research on population, free of the burden of teaching (Thompson 1923). The problem was finding appropriate men for the job, as nobody at that time had the right expertise. Scripps's first hire was sociologist Warren Thompson, who had not previously worked on Asia but had recently completed a dissertation analyzing vital rates in the United States and Europe (Thompson 1915). His second hire was Pascal Whelpton, who had a background in agricultural economics but no experience with population (Thompson 1965). Scripps's choice of relatively inexperienced scientists indicates his intention to develop a new field rather than further an established one. In carrying out the work for which they were hired, Thompson and Whelpton began to codify the new field. After Scripps's death in 1926, their research program continued with support from the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial and the Milbank Memorial Fund. The Milbank Memorial Fund, a public health–oriented philanthropy based in New York City, began to invest in population research in 1928. Although the Fund had already begun to improve public health and reduce mortality in the rural New York communities in which it worked (Fox 2006), board member Thomas Cochran had grown frustrated with the continual outlay of resources to improve the health of an expanding poor population in the United States. He suggested that the Fund's money could be better spent distributing birth control, reducing the incidence of poverty by reducing the fertility of the poor (Kiser n.d.). This proposition was controversial, as birth control remained illegal in many states. Cochran's plan signaled the beginning of convergence between what had previously been two separate political programs: birth control legalization and eugenics. Birth control advocates had initially emphasized the right of individuals and couples to control their fertility, not the potential for birth control to improve the “quality” of the population (Baker 2011). Meanwhile, the eugenics movement had concentrated on government-mandated sterilization (Kevles 1985; Stern 2005). Eugenicists initially opposed the legalization of birth control, which was much more widely used among the professional middle classes, whose fertility they hoped to promote, than among the poor, whose fertility they hoped to suppress (Baker 2011). But public support for eugenic sterilization programs was beginning to wane as genetic research suggested that their success would require the sterilization of “seemingly-normal” individuals who were thought to carry recessive genes for such antisocial traits as poverty and criminality (Pearl 1919), and as fascist governments in Europe increased the scope of their sterilization programs. American eugenicists turned to birth control as a more socially acceptable means of engineering population. Birth control advocates eagerly welcomed them to the fold, as eugenics had more popular support and scientific credibility at the time than did birth control (Baker 2011). However, there was as yet no empirical evidence that the legalization and spread of birth control would have any effect on population size or composition at the aggregate level. For this reason, the board of the Milbank Memorial Fund decided to launch its contraceptive efforts by establishing a research division, which it did in 1928. Following Scripps's example, the Milbank Memorial Fund hired young scientists, beginning with Frank Notestein, who had recently completed a Ph.D. at Cornell University under the direction of Milbank trustee Walter Willcox. In 1931, Notestein was joined by Clyde Kiser, who was then finishing a dissertation in sociology at Columbia University. The Milbank Memorial Fund was demography's most generous patron before World War II. In 1927, it provided funds for a World Population Conference, which laid the groundwork for the establishment of the International Union for the Scientific Investigation of Population Problems (IUSIPP, now the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population or IUSSP). The IUSIPP fostered an international network of population scientists, with representatives from North and South America, Australia, Europe, and Asia (IUSSP 1985). The Milbank Memorial Fund paid the bulk of the IUSIPP's operating expenses during its first decade and funded the 1931 establishment of the Population Association of America (PAA), which remains demography's professional association in the United States (Hodgson 1991). When PAA began its first journal, Population Literature (subsequently Population Index) in 1935, the Milbank Memorial Fund footed the bill. Milbank sponsored annual conferences on population beginning in the 1930s, and its journal, The Milbank Memorial Fund Quarterly, was a major outlet for demographic research until the early 1970s. In the 1930s, Milbank patronage for demography expanded under the influence of trustee Frederick Osborn. The long-term secretary of the American Eugenics Society, Osborn viewed demography as a potential ally in the Society's efforts to disassociate American eugenics from European fascism. Osborn publicly repudiated the overt racism that had characterized the eugenics practiced by other US organizations, such as the Eugenic Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor (Allen 1986; Grossner 1967), though he clung to socioeconomic status as a proxy for genetic quality (Osborn 1935a, 1935b; Ramsden 2008). What was unique about Osborn's eugenic program was that it aimed to put the means of eugenic selection into the hands of the public through the universal availability of birth control. To ensure that the public would use this power appropriately, Osborn hoped to create an environment of social control that would encourage the wealthy and well-educated to choose large families and the poor and less-educated to choose smaller families. Osborn viewed the emerging science of demography as a resource for identifying and manipulating the factors associated with individual childbearing decisions and promoted it as a scientific basis for his eugenic program (Osborn 1933, 1959). Demographers, like other scientists of their time, incorporated the basic tenets of eugenics into their worldviews and scholarship. However, as Italian and German demographers began to provide scientific support for their governments’ fascist and, in the latter case, ultimately genocidal population programs (Ipsen 1996; Kühl 1994), the field began to split along national lines, with demographers in the United States and the United Kingdom describing the work of their Italian and German colleagues as ideological rather than scientific (Glass 1935). The US and UK delegations of IUSIPP officially boycotted planned conferences in Rome in 1931 and Berlin in 1935, opening a rift that nearly destroyed the organization (Pitt-Rivers 1931; Lorimer 1935; MacKellar and Hart 2014). But American and British demographers did not abandon eugenics altogether. Instead they embraced Osborn's version (termed “reform” eugenics by Daniel Kevles [1985]), represented in the UK by C. P. Blacker, as a more respectable alternative. This new eugenics program also afforded access to patronage. The Eugenics Society of Great Britain, of which Blacker was secretary, then provided nearly all of the funding for the UK's Population Investigation Committee (Grebenik 1991), and Osborn became an important advocate for demography in the United States. Osborn's patronage blurred the boundaries between demography and its funders. Osborn often presented himself as a population scientist and has been described as such both by his contemporaries and by more recent scholars. He was a founding member and later a president of PAA, but held neither an advanced degree nor an academic affiliation nor a post in a statistical organization, at a time when such credentials were becoming increasingly important. Although he did co-author some publications with demographer Frank Lorimer, Osborn gained access to the field less through his intellectual contributions than through his ability to secure funding on its behalf, for which Notestein dubbed him “Demography's Statesman” (Notestein 1969). Osborn's involvement in the PAA and his close personal and working relationships with Frank Lorimer, Frank Notestein, and other demographers resulted in frequent contact between demographers and their patrons. Osborn seems to have devoted little of his own substantial wealth to demography, but, serving on the board of several philanthropic organizations, he was adept at linking funders to projects. In 1936, he arranged for the establishment of the Office of Population Research (OPR), an interdisciplinary research and graduate training center for demography, in Princeton University's School of Public and International Affairs. OPR received no institutional support from Princeton, but funding from Milbank supported the OPR's operations and provided graduate fellowships (Poole 1935a, 1935b, 1936; OPR 1939). Osborn selected Notestein to direct OPR, and his staff consisted entirely of other young scholars: Irene Taeuber, who had completed a Ph.D. in sociology at the University of Minnesota in 1931; Henry Shryock Jr., who was finishing a dissertation at the University of Wisconsin; and Dudley Kirk, then a graduate student at Harvard University. Osborn coordinated the work of OPR with that of the Milbank Memorial Fund and the Scripps Foundation. In the late 1930s, he secured a grant from the Carnegie Corporation, of which he was also a trustee, for a study involving all three research centers on the social and psychological correlates of childbearing, known informally as the Indianapolis Study. Fertility in the United States had declined precipitously during the Great Depression, and Osborn expected the results of the Indianapolis Study to inform policies that would stimulate population growth by increasing the fertility of only the middle and upper classes. In Notestein's words, Osborn “did an enormous amount of mining of resources” and “practically forced us into the Indianapolis Study” (Van Der Tak 2005, v.1: 12). Between the world wars, a small group of population-oriented scientists and the individuals and institutions that funded them began to build the interdiscipline that we now know as demography. Practitioners shared with their funders anxieties about population size and composition at the national and global levels and a belief that science held the solutions. Together they fashioned demography nearly whole-cloth. Certainly, established scientists such as Raymond Pearl were instrumental in drawing the attention of potential funders to the nascent field, and more senior scholars such as Alfred Lotka and Robert Kuczynski contributed demography's methodological foundations. But as patrons established the new field's institutions, they hired young scientists to direct them. Even though older scientists led the PAA and the IUSIPP in their early years, it was the young scientists whose work came to characterize the field (Hodgson 1991). Frank Notestein was only 34 years old when he became director of the world's only demography graduate training program, a position through which he quickly came to be recognized as the world's foremost authority on population. As topic modeling will demonstrate, Notestein and other young demographers were taking a new approach to population research and focusing their scholarship on questions of fertility and contraception—the issues at the intersection of birth control legalization and eugenics—to a greater extent than were social scientists who were not affiliated with the institutions established by demography's interwar patrons. By funding young scientists, demography's patrons nurtured a generation of scholars attuned to their particular issues; by building disciplinary institutions around them, patrons endowed their clients with scientific authority. During and after World War II, demography acquired powerful new benefactors who globalized the field and encouraged it to focus on slowing rapid population growth in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, the parts of the world that were becoming the focal points of the Cold War. Postwar patrons sponsored a remarkable expansion of demography, funding new population research centers, not just at US universities, but also in Asia and Latin America. They sponsored the publication of demography journals and provided graduate fellowships to expand the field by recruiting promising students. By the late 1960s, they had helped demography secure the patronage of the US government, which stimulated further expansion. Concern with the rate of population growth in Asia, Africa, and Latin America—and efforts to halt it—were new in the postwar period. Population had traditionally grown very slowly in those regions, with high mortality balancing high fertility, and data were largely unavailable to demographers in the US and Europe. During the war, OPR entered into contracts that expanded its demographers’ horizons. First, the League of Nations, with funding from the Carnegie Corporation of New York, commissioned studies on the demographic past and future of Europe (Griffith 1941). In the course of this research, OPR demographers coined the phrase “demographic transition” to describe a pattern they noticed occurring at different times in most of the countries they examined: mortality decline followed by fertility decline with rapid growth in between, all driven by modernization (Kirk 1944; Davis 1945; Notestein 1945). Several demographers had previously advanced elements of what would come to be known as demographic transition theory (Hodgson 1983; Szreter 1993; Kirk 1996), but in their wartime work OPR staff articulated the theory for the first time and formalized it as a basis for population projections (Notestein et al. 1944). During World War II, OPR also contracted with the US Department of State to acquire and analyze demographic data for “the major non-European regions of the world so that it could be in a position to supply information promptly on any section of the world” (OPR 1942). The agreement allowed for the pooling of resources and research between State Department and League of Nations projects. OPR demographers discovered that, in parts of Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East, mortality was beginning to decline, resulting in population growth. Unlike in the European countries they had analyzed, this mortality decline was not a result of modernization or industrialization, but rather of imperialism (Notestein 1944; Davis 1944). Colonial governments had provided a modicum of relief from famine, disease, and violence, reducing mortality enough to produce sustained population growth. But colonial governments also blocked and even reversed industrialization in these areas, preventing the economic development that would have stimulated the demographic transition (Hodgson 1983). Writing in 1944, Frank Notestein and Kingsley Davis, both at OPR, warned that continued population growth outside of the demographic transition framework would swell the number of people living on the margins of subsistence, leaving the populations of poor countries more vulnerable to economic shocks and natural disasters and increasing the vulnerability of the world to violent unrest. Initially, Notestein and Davis argued that birth control was neither necessary nor sufficient to slow population growth in colonial territories. They recognized that the European and American middle classes had begun to limit the size of their families at a time when birth control was rudimentary and generally illegal, using such well-known and universally available techniques as abstinence and withdrawal. They also noticed that, as condoms, diaphragms, and spermicides became more readily available between the wars, they were not used to any great extent in Europe or the United States by the poor or by rural dwellers, who lacked the socioeconomic incentives for small families that had motivated fertility control among the urban middle classes (Stix and Notestein 1940). Notestein and Davis reasoned from the experience of Western Europe and the United States that reducing fertility would require the economic development that would complete the demographic transition. Absent economic development, the spread of modern contraceptives would have little effect (Notestein 1944; Davis 1944, 1945). Attributing high fertility to the poverty perpetuated by continued imperialism and economic domination by the countries of Europe and North America, Notestein and Davis recommended political and economic independence and the development of indigenous middle classes and civil societies as the most rapid route to fertility decline. Within just a few years, however, Notestein and Davis began to shift their analysis, describing poverty as the result of rapid population growth rather than its cause, and suggesting that the right contraceptive technology could reduce fertility in advance of economic development (Davis 1946, 1950a, 1950b; Notestein 1948, 1950). This new perspective, the emergence of which has been well described and explained by Hodgson (1983, 1988) and Szreter (1993), suggested that an as-yet-nonexistent new form of birth control could provide a relatively quick and cheap solution to the problem of rapid population growth—and the poverty that was now seen as its effect rather than its cause—that did not require any change in existing social, political, or economic structures. The shift coincided with investments in demography by a new patron, John D. Rockefeller 3rd, and helped demography to attract the support of the Ford Foundation, which was just beginning its work in international development. John D. Rockefeller 3rd (grandson of Standard Oil and Rockefeller Foundation founder John Davison Rockefeller) had long been interested in the legalization of birth control, following in the footsteps of his father, who had funded the scientific and political activities of Margaret Sanger and Clarence Gamble through the Bureau of Social Hygiene, the National Committee on Maternal Health, and the National Research Council's Committee for Research in Problems of Sex (Harr 1988, pp. 455, 459). Between the wars, the Rockefeller Foundation, of which Rockefeller became a trustee in 1931 and chairman in 1952, had supported demography only indirectly, through funding for the American and British Eugenics Societies (Harr 1988; Grebenik 1991). By the late 1930s, Osborn, a friend of Rockefeller's father and a trustee of the Rockefeller Institute, had begun to impress upon Rockefeller the close relationship between birth control, eugenics, and demography (Harr 1988, p. 457). In 1944, the Rockefeller Foundation made its first grants in demography, just over $17,000 to the Scripps Foundation and $200,000 to OPR (Rockefeller Foundation 1944). Rockefeller Foundation officials took Notestein and his OPR colleague Irene Taeuber on a tour of East Asia in 1948. This experience, together with the 1950 Communist victory in China's long-running civil war, further solidified Notestein's opinion of the dire threat posed by po

Teaching Through the Lenses of Orality and Literacy: One Professor’s Journey

Teaching discipleship in a theological seminary, one is challenged by the diverse world that students serve. According to a 2004 study conducted for the United Nations by Princeton University (Office of Population Research), approximately 80% of the world's population operated as primarily oral communicators (3.74 billion). Only 2% of the world's population (123 million) was highly literate (e.g., students, staff, and professors at a theological seminary). Anthropologists and missionaries are addressing orality's impact on the teaching–learning process; surprisingly, educators are not. How do professional religious educators prepare students to engage oral cultures in their hometowns and around the world? This article describes the ongoing, transformational process of both a professor and her Western, highly literate classroom. Through the lens of orality, each now affirms and practices new ways of seeing, learning, and teaching.

Population Index on the Web

Population Index on the Web

Regions and time in the European fertility transition: problems in the Princeton Project’s statistical methodology1

Much empirical social‐science research, including work in economic and demographic history, has relied on the analysis of published information on administrative districts. One famous example of this type of research, the Princeton Project on the Decline of Fertility in Europe (EFP), was carried out at Princeton University’s Office of Population Research in the 1960s and 1970s. This project aimed to characterize the decline of fertility that took place in Europe during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The project’s summary statements argued that social and economic forces played little role in bringing about the fertility transition. A central feature of the EFP argument is a series of statistical exercises which purport to show that changes in economic and social conditions exerted little influence on fertility. Two recent articles on Germany for this period have used similar data and methods to draw different conclusions. We show that the difference reflects problems in the Princeton project’s statistical methods. Those problems affect, potentially, virtually all quantitative research of this type. Our findings suggest cautious re‐thinking of conclusions based on this type of evidence, starting with the EFP.

Flagships, Feeders, and the Texas Top 10% Law: A Test of the “Brain Drain” Hypothesis

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Additional informationNotes on contributorsMarta TiendaMarta Tienda is Maurice P. During ‘22 Professor in Demographic Studies and Professor of Sociology at Princeton University. Sunny Xinchun Niu is Research Associate in the Office of Population Research at Princeton University.Sunny Xinchun NiuMarta Tienda is Maurice P. During ‘22 Professor in Demographic Studies and Professor of Sociology at Princeton University. Sunny Xinchun Niu is Research Associate in the Office of Population Research at Princeton University.

Disseminating On‐line Reproductive Health Information in Arabic: Results from a Survey of Users of an Emergency Contraception Website

AbstractIn May 2003, Ibis Reproductive Health and the Office of Population Research at Princeton University launched the first Arabic-language website dedicated to emergency contraception. During the first 19 months of the website's operation, 212 individuals completed an on-line Arabic-language survey dedicated to visitor demographics, website quality, and priorities for additional health information and venues for dissemination. This paper presents the results of this survey. The responses suggest that readers are not only eager to obtain accurate information about emergency contraception but that there is also considerable enthusiasm for the development of on-line Arabic-language resources dedicated to additional aspects of sexuality and reproductive health.

Demographers’ Involvement in Twentieth-Century Population Policy: Continuity or Discontinuity?

The second half of the twentieth century witnessed the development of a crusading spirit and massive technical aid aimed at reducing fertility levels and rates of population growth in developing countries, and also the involvement of demographers in these events. The demographers at Princeton University’s Office of Population Research, Frank Notestein and his colleagues, have been singled out by recent authors as playing a unique role in bringing about these changes, and they have been criticized for encouraging demographers to become involved, so eroding their scientific objectivity. This paper examines the development of relevant population thought and theory in the English-language literature over the first half of the twentieth century. It concludes that in the circumstances of the second half of the twentieth century, it was inevitable that developed countries and their demographers would become involved in controlling fertility levels in developing countries. The OPR story should be seen largely in terms of how the world’s leading demographic center and its demographic transition theory were swept along by global changes. As those developments started, attitudes to population change in densely settled Asia became Malthusian, even as population growth accompanied by mortality decline in Asia demonstrated that, at least in the short term, the positive checks were disappearing.

In Tribute to Willard Fahrenkamp King: (July 13, 1924 - November 8, 2004)

IN TRD3UTE TO WILLARD FAHRENKAMP KING (July 13, 1924 - November 8, 2004) When Willard F. King died on Monday, November 8, 2004, Hispanists ofearly modern Spanish literature lost an extraordinary scholar and major contributor to the study ofseventeenth-century literature. Her books, articles , translations, and reviews are among the most vital components of Golden Age Spanish criticism. Dr. King's career began with the publication oí Prosa novelística y academias literarias en el siglo XVII (1963) by the Royal Spanish Academy. It deals with the rise of literary academies in the seventeenth century and is acclaimed for its comprehensive research and insightfulness. Her major works of the seventies were the authorship and translation (with Selma Margaretten) ofAmerico Castro's The Spaniards: An Introduction to Their History (1971) and a translation and study of Lope de Vega's tragedy, The Knight of Olmedo (1972). Dr. King also wrote Juan Ruiz de Alarcón, letrado y dramaturgo: Su mundo mexicano y español (1989), a highly comprehensive and influential study ofthe life and works ofthe seventeenth-century playwright, Juan Ruiz de Alarcón y Mendoza. The study includes minute details ofthe dramatist's life from his youth in Mexico to the University of Salamanca, where he studied law, and of his later life and illustrious literary career in Madrid. Her book offers an understanding ofthe complexities and uniqueness of Ruiz de Alarcón and his work. Her most recent undertaking was an essay entitled "The Importance of Endings: The Second Death of Don Quijote," which she delivered at a conference at Texas A&M International University in Laredo, Texas, in April, 1996. It is an astounding and detailed study oftraditional baroque endings and of how authors bring to conclusion such notable works as 205 206BCom, Vol. 57, No. 1 (2005) Shakespeare's King Lear and Pérez Galdós's Doña Perfecta. Dr. Ray M. Keck, President ofTexas A&M International University, read a portion of this essay as a eulogy to Dr. King. In her essay, Dr. King argues that our knight and hero's seemingly untimely death was "as it should be" in the realm ofbaroque literature. Dr. King gives voice to our desire as readers, together with Sancho, to see Don Quijote rise from his death bed to again mount Rocinante and continue to entertain us with his unattainable quest to bring justice to a cruel world. But, alas, it cannot be. Our hero's pain and suffering must end so that order may once again be restored. To acknowledge his death was, in her view, "the dignified acceptance ofthe human condition." Born in Roswell, New Mexico, Dr. King grew up in Big Spring and Fort Worth, Texas. She was graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Texas at Austin and completed her doctoral studies at Brown University under the guidance ofWilliam Fichter. She researched in the Office ofPopulation Research in Princeton, then at the Institute for Advanced Study as personal secretary and research assistant to the historian Erwin Panofsky. At Bryn Mawr College, Dr. King served in several capacities: as a faculty member, as secretary to the faculty, and as chair of the department of Spanish for two decades. Dr. King's enduring contribution to Hispanic studies ofthe seventeenth century has come through the continuing influence ofher teaching. Many graduate and undergraduate students have grown intellectually and emotionally from her example, for she was a model scholar, a rigorous teacher, and a caring person. She was highly disciplined, productive, and principled , and unselfishly went out ofher way to support students, colleagues, and friends. Dr. King inspired students to produce their best work, and she gladly promoted the careers of scholars past and present, whose contributions continue to shape studies of seventeenth-century Hispanic literature and culture. Her intense love for literature was shared by her husband , Edmund King, and together they regularly welcomed students and faculty to their home in Princeton. Upon her retirement from Bryn Mawr, she served as resident director of the International Institute in Madrid, Spain. Personally, I am deeply touched by the life and death of Willard F. King. In life, she was a pillar of strength and a model of discipline. Dr. King was...

Dudley Kirk on Population Changes and Prospective Power Relations after World War II: A View from 1943

The theory of demographic transition in its best‐known modern formulation was developed in the early 1940s by a small group of researchers associated with Princeton University's Office of Population Research, under the leadership of Frank W. Notestein. A notable early adumbration of the theory in print—in fact preceding the most often cited contemporaneous articles by Notestein and by Kingsley Davis—was by Dudley Kirk, one of the Princeton demographers, in an article titled “Population changes and the postwar world,” originally presented by its author on 4 December 1943 at the 38th Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Society, held in New York. It is reproduced below in full from the February 1944 issue of American Sociological Review (Vol. 9, no. 1, pp. 28–35).In the article Kirk, then 30 years old, briefly discusses essential elements of the concept of the demographic transition. He characterizes trends in birth and death rates as closely linked to developmental changes: to the transition “from a peasant, self‐sufficient society to an urban, industrial society.” He sees the countries of the world as arranged on a “single continuum of development” and, correspondingly, on a continuum of demographic configurations. These countries, he suggests, may be divided into three broad groups: the first, with high mortality and high fertility, possessing great potential population growth; the second, “caught up in the tide of industrialization and urbanization,” hence exhibiting birth and death rates that are both declining but in a pattern that generates rapid population growth; and a third, with low fertility and low mortality, pointing toward the prospect of eventual depopulation. He describes the temporal and geographic process of material progress and demographic change as one of cultural and technological diffusion emanating from the West. But Kirk's main interest in this article is the effects of the patterns generated by economic change and the ensuing demographic transition on shifts in relative power—military and economic—within the system of nations, both historically and in the then dawning postcolonial era. On the latter score, even if occasionally colored by judgments reflecting perspectives unsurprising in 1943, such as in his assessment of the economic potential of the Soviet Union, Kirk's probing of the likely consequences of evolving trends in power relationships as shaped by shifting economic and demographic weights—issues now largely neglected in population studies—is often penetrating and remarkably prescient. His views on the implication of these trends for the desirable American stance toward the economic and demographic modernization of less developed countries—friendly assistance resulting in rapid expansion of markets, and trade speeding a social evolution that also brings about slower population growth—represent what became an influential strand in postwar US foreign policy.Dudley Kirk was born 6 October 1913 in Rochester, New York, but grew up in California. After graduating from Pomona College, he received an M.A. in international relations from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy of Tufts University in 1935 and a Ph.D. in sociology from Harvard in 1946. He was associated with Princeton's OPR between 1939 and 1947, where he published his influential monograph Europe's Population in the Interwar Years (1946) and, with Frank Notestein and others, coauthored the book The Future Population of Europe and the Soviet Union (1944). From 1947 to 1954 he was demographer in the Office of Intelligence Research of the US State Department, the first person having that title in the federal government. From 1954 to 1967 he was director of the Demographic Division of the Population Council in New York, and from 1967 until his retirement in 1979 he was professor of population studies at Stanford University. In 1959–60 he was president of the Population Association of America. Dudley Kirk died 14 March 2000 in San Jose, California.

The Decline of Fertility in Europe: The Revised Proceedings of a Conference on the Princeton European Fertility Project.

These conference proceedings report on the culmination but not the termination of the Princeton research project on the fertility decline within each of several hundred provinces in Europe. Even before the projects beginning in 1963 Princetons office of Population Research produced books and dissertations on the European fertility decline. The extensive historical demographic statistics of high quality available for Europe made it possible to systematically extend Leasures approach to Spanish fertility decline to the several hundred provinces of Europe from the period preceding fertility decline through the major fertility changes. Prior to the 1979 conference 6 books and many articles were written as a part of this project. Since a synthesis of all this reasearch exceeded a reasonable research agenda for any single individual it was decided to hold a conference for those who had written books and those who were particularly interested in the subject. Authors who had previously written on the subject were asked to contribute papers not on the countries they had already written about but on interrelations that extended to several countries. This volume also includes colored maps showing the geographic distribution of the estimated date of the beginning of the marital fertility decline in European provinces.

Toward the cumulation of demographic knowledge

According to the widely-held theory of the demographic transition, increasing urbanization, education, and industrialization induce declining mortality and, with a lag, declining fertility. But is this generalization supported by the evidence? Empirical studies at Princeton's Office of Population Research (OPR) in the early 1960s raised doubts. A doctoral dissertation by William Leasure showed that the decline of fertility in Spain was not readily explained by this simple version of the demographic transition. Another study by John Knodel and Nathanial Iskandar found only a slight difference in the timing of the marital fertility decline in England and Hungary, despite very different levels of education, mortality, and industrialization. A similarly puzzling parallel in marital fertility decline occurred in Norway and Romania. These seeming contradictions led Ansley Coale in 1963 to initiate one of the most ambitious social science research inquiries ever undertaken, the European Fertility Project (EFP). The purpose of this project was to mine the extensive high quality historical demographic statistics of the countries of Europe to investigate fertility change by province from the predecline period through 1960. In the course of this project, Coale enlisted the collaboration of a number of demographers now of national and international reknown. Seven country studies have so far been published-in order of appearance, Portugal, by Massimo Livi-Bacci; Germany, by John Knodel; France, by Etienne van de Walle; Belgium, by Ron J. Lesthaeghe; Italy, also by Livi-Bacci; Russia, by Coale, Barbara A. Anderson, and Erna Harm; and Great Britain, by Michael S. Teitelbaum. In addition, the present volume's references list numerous articles and several dissertations resulting from the project, a number of them reporting on other areas of Europe than those covered in the monographs. The present volume is the result of a conference held in 1979. The aim, commendably, was not to summarize the country studies, but to attempt to develop generalizations, both descriptive and causal, drawing on data from all of the countries studied. The authors of the volume include either persons who were responsible for the country studies or significant others closely associated with EFP. Some outsiders partici-

Advances in theP/Fratio method for the analysis of birth histories

Abstract One of the most frequently used indirect techniques for deriving estimates of recent fertility from simple questions in censuses and surveys is the 'P/F ratio' method. Availability of detailed birth-history data, as in the World Fertility Survey, and applications of the P/F procedure as a diagnostic tool in the evaluation of the quality of data have led to simplifications and extensions of the original method. This analysis illustrates that when complete maternity histories are available, the P/F procedure can be simplified and made more powerful by (1) calculation of P/F values from cohort-period fertility rates and (2) use of two further indexing variables, namely duration since first marriage and duration since first birth, in addition to age. More generally, the paper indicates that a set of P/F values is only one of a battery of measures which aid in the analysis of trends and errors in data from maternity histories. Illustrative examples are given from various analyses of world Fertility Survey data. Howard Goldberg has been independently pursuing an investigation of the P/F procedure by marriage duration at the Office of Population Research (Princeton University), and we have profited from recent discussions with him. We would also like to acknowledge useful comments and criticisms on earlier drafts from James Trussell and Kenneth Hill.

The prevalence of cervical cancer screening in the United States in 1970

The Papanicolaou smear history of 6,752 ever-married women under 45 years old residing in the United States, was obtained by the 1970 National Fertility Study, conducted by the Office of Population Research at Princeton University. An epidemiologic analysis of these data is presented, and women who had never had a Papanicolaou smear, those who had had a smear more than 12 months before interview, and those who had had a smear during the previous 12 months are deseribed.

Historical Demography by Aggregative Methods: Nineteenth-Century France

The question of French fertility decline has been a central issue in the last three decades of research on tile modernization of European family structures and reproductive behavior. This is because the course of the French decline fits awkwardly into the overworked and by now discredited theory of a demographic transition.' Simply stated, the theory holds that European fertility fell because social and economic modernization compelled changes in family structures, goals, and functions, the net effect of which was to encourage and reward deliberate limitation of family size through contraception. Why then did fertility in France begin falling significantly decades before it did in England, which was in the vanguard of economic and social modernization, or before any other Western population? To answer this, nearly all research has focused on the pre-Revolutionary era to find the origins of voluntary fertility control, and the means of their diffusion, from class to class and region to region. Until now, no detailed, accurate indices of fertility have been computed for the departements of post-Revolutionary France. All earlier efforts have treated the data uncritically, and none has computed complete indices for the entire nineteenth century departement by departement.2 Because this held true for the rest of Europe as well, the Office of Population Research at Princeton University in I964 launched the European Fertility Project. Its purpose has been to reconstruct and

UNITED STATES: The Papal Encyclical and Catholic Practice and Attitudes, 1969

CHARLES F. WESTOFF, Professor of Sociology and Associate Director of the Office of Population Research, Princeton University, and Norman B. Ryder, Professor of Sociology, University of Wisconsin, have prepared this summary of a more extensive account to appear in their book Reproduction in the United States: 1965, to be published by Princeton University Press. The authors acknowledge their appreciation to Adrienne Simmonds, Jennifer Skilling, and Lisa Jones of the Office of Population Research, Princeton University, for data processing; and to Aaron Spector and the Staff of the Institute for Social Research of Temple University for carrying out the interviewing. This study examines the effect of the Papal Encyclical Humanae Vitae on contraceptive behavior and attitudes among Catholic women in the United States. An article summarizing impressions of the international reaction to the Encyclical is also Dresented in this issue of the bulletin.

New Techniques to Estimate Fertility and Mortality: The Case of Colombia

Some methods of stable and quasi-stable population analysis recently developed at the Office of Population Research of Princeton University were applied to the problems of inferring levels and trends in the vital rates of the Colombian population during the intercensal years 1938-1951 and 1951-1964. Analysis of census data indicated a gain of 7-8 years in life expectancy at age 5 for Colombian women between 1938-1951 and 1951-1964 and of about 4 years in the corresponding figure for males. Mortality risks in Colombia had recently been higher than they were in countries such as Brazil and Mexico. Whereas life expectancy at age 5 for males would not be higher than 55 years even if the male rate of growth for the 1951-1964 period were assumed to be equal to the female rate reported calculations for Mexico indicated a figure of 59 years and for Brazil a figure of about 60 years for the period 1950-1960. With higher mortality in Colombia and about the same rate of natural increase for the three countries the implication was a higher level of fertility in Colombia which seemed to be corroborated when the cumulative age distribution of Colombian males and females in 1964 were compared with their Brazilian or Mexican counterparts in the 1960 census. At all ages and for both sexes the Colombian data yielded evidence of a somewhat younger population which necessarily implied a higher level of fertility combated to the other two countries. The results suggested that Colombia was still behind these two other countries as far as the transition in mortality was concerned. A higher level of fertility in Colombia than in Mexico or Brazil unless counteracted by changes in marriage patterns or in reproductive habits might lead to acceleration of the rate of growth as mortality declines further.

Life Tables from Limited Data: A Demographic Approach. By George J. Stolnitz [Pp. xii+164. Office of Population Research, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey, 1956. $4.00.]

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BARCLAY, GEORGE W. A Report on Tai wan's Population to The Joint Commis sion on Rural Reconstruction. Pp. xii, 120. Princeton, N. J.: Office of Popu lation Research, Princeton University, 1954. $2.50

BARCLAY, GEORGE W. A Report on Tai wan's Population to The Joint Commis sion on Rural Reconstruction. Pp. xii, 120. Princeton, N. J.: Office of Popu lation Research, Princeton University, 1954. $2.50

Culture, Technology, and Population Change

In this article, Irene Taeuber, of the Office of Population Research at Princeton University, points out some consequences of population pressures in many areas of the world. She believes that the cultural patterns of the people of these areas must be analyzed in order to resolve this demographic imbalance.