The demographic future of Asia is a global issue. As the biggest driver of population growth, an understanding of patterns and trends in fertility throughout Asia is critical to understand our shared demographic future. This is the first book to comprehensively and systematically analyse fertility across the continent through the perspective of individuals themselves rather than as a consequence of top-down government policies.

In this book new mathematical and statistical techniques that permit more sophisticated analysis are refined and applied to questions of current concern in order to understand the forces that are driving the recent dramatic changes in family patterns. The areas examined include the impact of the evolving Second Demographic Transition, where complex patterns of gender dynamics and social change are re-orienting family life. New analyses of marriage, cohabitation, union dynamics, and union dissolution provide a fresh look at the changing family life cycle, emerging patterns of partner choice, and the impact of union dissolution on the life course. The demography of kinship is explored, and the importance of parity progression to the generation of the kinship web is highlighted. The methodology of population projections by family status is examined, and new results presented that demonstrate how recognizing family status advances long term policy objectives, especially with regard to children and the elderly. This book applies up-to-date methods to examine the demography of the family, and will be of value to sociologists, demographers, and all those who are interested in the family.

This handbook provides a global perspective on contemporary demographic theories and studies of marriage and the family. Inside, readers will find a comprehensive analysis that enables demographic comparison between and across international borders. Coverage is centered around four main sections that present a history of marriage and the family, detail relevant data and measurement concerns, examine global marriage practices, analyze interactions of such demographic characteristics as age, sex, and race with marriage and the family, and consider public policy, contemporary trends, and future directions. In addition, the book includes research on current social issues such as alternative family structures, cohabitation, divorce, boomerang children, and adoption. The family is universal but extremely varied in form and function. This handbook provides students, researchers, and policymakers with an all-inclusive, international demographic analysis that fully investigates the diverse nature of the modern family.

Whether considered from an American or a European perspective, the past four decades have seen family life become increasingly complex. Changing Family Dynamics and Demographic Evolution examines the various stages of change through the image of a kaleidoscope, providing new insights into the field of family dynamics and diversity.

This open access book examines the triangle between family, gender, and health in Europe from a demographic perspective. It helps to understand patterns and trends in each of the three components separately, as well as their interdependencies. It overcomes the widely observable specialization in demographic research, which usually involves researchers studying either family or fertility processes or focusing on health and mortality. Coverage looks at new family and partnership forms among the young and middle-aged, their relationship with health, and the pathways through which they act. Among the old, lifelong family biography and present family situation are explored. Evidence is provided that partners advancing in age start to resemble each other more closely in terms of health, with the health of the partner being a crucial factor of an individual’s own health. Gender-specific health outcomes and pathways are central in the designs of the studies and the discussion of the results. The book compares twelve European countries reflecting different welfare state regimes and offers country-specific studies conducted in Austria, Germany, Italy - all populations which have received less attention in the past - and Sweden. As a result, readers discover the role of different concepts of family and health as well as comparisons within European countries and ethnic groups. It will be an insightful resource for students, academics, policy makers, and researchers that will help define future research in terms of gender and public health.

With the radical transformation of family structure in most Western nations and its important social and economic implications, studies in family demographics have increased dramatically in recent years. The second volume in a new series undertaken in conjunction with the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population, this collection documents recent methodological developments in the demographic analysis of families, households, and kin groups, including the analysis of the family life cycle and the construction of multistate life tables and simulation models. The volume also addresses the projection of the number and composition of families and households, a topic of great practical importance, and it proposes a number of refinements and alternatives to the simple conventional approaches now taken.

Richard Soloway offers a compelling and authoritative study of the relationship of the eugenics movement to the dramatic decline in the birthrate and family size in twentieth-century Britain. Working in a tradition of hereditarian determinism which held fast to the premise that "like tends to beget like," eugenicists developed and promoted a theory of biosocial engineering through selective reproduction. Soloway shows that the appeal of eugenics to the middle and upper classes of British society was closely linked to recurring concerns about the relentless drop in fertility and the rapid spread of birth control practices from the 1870s to World War II. Demography and Degeneration considers how differing scientific and pseudoscientific theories of biological inheritance became popularized and enmeshed in the prolonged, often contentious national debate about "race suicide" and "the dwindling family." Demographic statistics demonstrated that birthrates were declining among the better-educated, most successful classes while they remained high for the poorest, least-educated portion of the population. For many people steeped in the ideas of social Darwinism, eugenicist theories made this decline all the more alarming: they feared that falling birthrates among the "better" classes signfied a racial decline and degeneration that might prevent Britain from successfully negotiating the myriad competive challenges facing the nation in the twentieth century. Although the organized eugenics movement remained small and elitist throughout most of its history, this study demonstrates how pervasive eugenic assumptions were in the middle and upper reaches of British society, at least until World War II. It also traces the important role of eugenics in the emergence of the modern family planning movement and the formulation of population policies in the interwar years.