This overview includes chapters on child mortality, adult mortality, fertility, proximate determinants, marriage, internal migration, international migration, and the demographic impact of AIDS.

These essays examine the global impact of infertility as a major reproductive health issue, one that has profoundly affected the lives of countless women and men. The contributors address a range of topics including how the deeply gendered nature of infertility sets the blame on women's shoulders.

In the United States, some populations suffer from far greater disparities in health than others. Those disparities are caused not only by fundamental differences in health status across segments of the population, but also because of inequities in factors that impact health status, so-called determinants of health. Only part of an individual's health status depends on his or her behavior and choice; community-wide problems like poverty, unemployment, poor education, inadequate housing, poor public transportation, interpersonal violence, and decaying neighborhoods also contribute to health inequities, as well as the historic and ongoing interplay of structures, policies, and norms that shape lives. When these factors are not optimal in a community, it does not mean they are intractable: such inequities can be mitigated by social policies that can shape health in powerful ways. Communities in Action: Pathways to Health Equity seeks to delineate the causes of and the solutions to health inequities in the United States. This report focuses on what communities can do to promote health equity, what actions are needed by the many and varied stakeholders that are part of communities or support them, as well as the root causes and structural barriers that need to be overcome.

Surveys the state of knowledge and research on the determinants of human reproduction. This book adopts an inter-disciplinary approach and integrates information from demographic, epidemiological and biological studies of fertility. The chapters provide a comprehensive overview of reproductive processes.

This book provides a unique blend of social and biomedical sciences in the field of low fertility and reproductive health. It offers a significant contribution to understanding the determinants of low fertility mostly in East Asia, including an assessment of the effectiveness of policies that aim to raise fertility. It introduces new analytical tools and methods and shares application of innovative approaches to analyzing cross-sectional and longitudinal survey data and macro socioeconomic data to shed light on changing mechanisms of low fertility in the context of reproductive health. The volume introduces the demographic dividend into the study of fertility, analyzes possible impact of population ageing on the amount of resources allocated to child rearing, i.e. the so called "crowding effect" in social care and public spending between the elderly and children. The book also tests the Low Fertility Trap (LFT) hypothesis, a new important theory regarding fertility trends. The book focuses on East Asia which is numerically large but relatively under-researched with regard to issues covered in various chapters. The relevance of the volume, however, goes beyond countries in East Asia. The book breaks new grounds and reveals little known facts regarding the influence of endocrine disruptors on male fertility through falling sperm counts, the phenomenon of marital sexlessness and about the sexual behavior of adolescents in East Asia.

This four-volume collection of over 140 original chapters covers virtually everything of interest to demographers, sociologists, and others. Over 100 authors present population subjects in ways that provoke thinking and lead to the creation of new perspectives, not just facts and equations to be memorized. The articles follow a theory-methods-applications approach and so offer a kind of "one-stop shop" that is well suited for students and professors who need non-technical summaries, such as political scientists, public affairs specialists, and others. Unlike shorter handbooks, Demography: Analysis and Synthesis offers a long overdue, thorough treatment of the field. Choosing the analytical method that fits the data and the situation requires insights that the authors and editors of Demography: Analysis and Synthesis have explored and developed. This extended examination of demographic tools not only seeks to explain the analytical tools themselves, but also the relationships between general population dynamics and their natural, economic, social, political, and cultural environments. Limiting themselves to human populations only, the authors and editors cover subjects that range from the core building blocks of population change--fertility, mortality, and migration--to the consequences of demographic changes in the biological and health fields, population theories and doctrines, observation systems, and the teaching of demography. The international perspectives brought to these subjects is vital for those who want an unbiased, rounded overview of these complex, multifaceted subjects. Topics to be covered: * Population Dynamics and the Relationship Between Population Growth and Structure * The Determinants of Fertility * The Determinants of Mortality * The Determinants of Migration * Historical and Geographical Determinants of Population * The Effects of Population on Health, Economics, Culture, and the Environment * Population Policies * Data Collection Methods and Teaching about Population Studies * All chapters share a common format * Each chapter features several cross-references to other chapters * Tables, charts, and other non-text features are widespread * Each chapter contains at least 30 bibliographic citations

Awarded the W. W. Howells Award for the Outstanding Book in Biological Anthropology, this volume presents a comprehensive, integrated, and up-to-date overview of the major physiological and behavioral factors affecting human reproduction. In attempting to identify the most important causes of variation in fertility within and among human populations, Wood summarizes data from a wide range of societies. Trained as an anthropologist as well as a demographer, he devotes special attention to so-called ""natural fertility"" populations, in which modern contraceptives and induced abortion are not used to limit reproductive output. Such an emphasis enables him to study the interaction of biology and behavior with particular clarity.The volume weaves together the physiological, demographic, and biometric approaches to human fertility in a way that will encourage future interdisciplinary research. Instead of offering a general overview, the focus is to answer one question: Why does fertility and the number of live births vary from couple to couple within any particular population, and from population to population across the human species as a whole?Topics covered include ovarian function, conception and pregnancy, intrauterine mortality, reproductive maturation and senescence, coital frequency and the waiting time to conception, marriage patterns and the initiation of reproduction, the fertility-reducing effects of breastfeeding, the impact of maternal nutrition on reproduction, and reproductive seasonality. This unique combination of comprehensive subject matter and an integrated analytical approach makes the book ideally suited both as a graduate-level textbook and as a reference work.

This volume surveys the state of knowledge and research on the determinants of human reproduction. It adopts an inter-disciplinary approach and integrates information from demographic, epidemiological and biological studies of fertility.The chapters provide a comprehensive overview of reproductive processes, including puberty and menopause, conception and fetal loss, and the effects of sexually transmitted diseases and lactation. The volume also considers the effects on fertility of nutrition and stress, environmental andoccupational hazards, and social behaviour, and includes clinical papers on fertility following contraceptive use and treatment of infertility. Findings from original research on the determinants of human reproduction are also presented.

An authoritative overview of the concepts and applications of biological demography This book provides a comprehensive introduction to biodemography, an exciting interdisciplinary field that unites the natural science of biology with the social science of human demography. Biodemography is an essential resource for demographers, epidemiologists, gerontologists, and health professionals as well as ecologists, population biologists, entomologists, and conservation biologists. This accessible and innovative book is also ideal for the classroom. James Carey and Deborah Roach cover everything from baseline demographic concepts to biodemographic applications, and present models and equations in discrete rather than continuous form to enhance mathematical accessibility. They use a wealth of real-world examples that draw from data sets on both human and nonhuman species and offer an interdisciplinary approach to demography like no other, with topics ranging from kinship theory and family demography to reliability engineering, tort law, and demographic disasters such as the Titanic and the destruction of Napoleon's Grande Armée. Provides the first synthesis of demography and biology Covers baseline demographic models and concepts such as Lexis diagrams, mortality, fecundity, and population theory Features in-depth discussions of biodemographic applications like harvesting theory and mark-recapture Draws from data sets on species ranging from fruit flies and plants to elephants and humans Uses a uniquely interdisciplinary approach to demography, bringing together a diverse range of concepts, models, and applications Includes informative "biodemographic shorts," appendixes on data visualization and management, and more than 150 illustrations of models and equations

The increasing prevalence of preterm birth in the United States is a complex public health problem that requires multifaceted solutions. Preterm birth is a cluster of problems with a set of overlapping factors of influence. Its causes may include individual-level behavioral and psychosocial factors, sociodemographic and neighborhood characteristics, environmental exposure, medical conditions, infertility treatments, and biological factors. Many of these factors co-occur, particularly in those who are socioeconomically disadvantaged or who are members of racial and ethnic minority groups. While advances in perinatal and neonatal care have improved survival for preterm infants, those infants who do survive have a greater risk than infants born at term for developmental disabilities, health problems, and poor growth. The birth of a preterm infant can also bring considerable emotional and economic costs to families and have implications for public-sector services, such as health insurance, educational, and other social support systems. Preterm Birth assesses the problem with respect to both its causes and outcomes. This book addresses the need for research involving clinical, basic, behavioral, and social science disciplines. By defining and addressing the health and economic consequences of premature birth, this book will be of particular interest to health care professionals, public health officials, policy makers, professional associations and clinical, basic, behavioral, and social science researchers.