Jenna Nobles

Subjective socioeconomic status and health: relationships reconsidered.

Subjective status, an individuals perception of her socioeconomic standing, is a robust predictor of physical health in many societies. To date, competing interpretations of this correlation remain unresolved. Using longitudinal data on 8430 older adults from the 2000 and 2007 waves of the Indonesia Family Life Survey, we test these oft-cited links. As in other settings, perceived status is a robust predictor of self-rated health, and also of physical functioning and nurse-assessed general health. These relationships persist in the presence of controls for unobserved traits, such as difficult-to-measure aspects of family background and persistent aspects of personality. However, we find evidence that these links likely represent bi-directional effects. Declines in health that accompany aging are robust predictors of declines in perceived socioeconomic status, net of observed changes to the economic profile of respondents. The results thus underscore the social value afforded good health status.

Migration and Father Absence: Shifting Family Structure in Mexico

Despite many changing demographic processes in Mexico—declining adult mortality, rising divorce, and rising nonmarital fertility—Mexican children’s family structure has been most affected by rising migration rates. Data from five national surveys spanning three decades demonstrate that since 1976, migration has shifted from the least common to the most common form of father household absence. Presently, more than 1 in 5 children experience a father’s migration by age 15; 1 in 11 experiences his departure to the United States. The proportions are significantly higher among those children born in rural communities and those born to less-educated mothers. The findings emphasize the importance of framing migration as a family process with implications for children’s living arrangements and attendant well-being, particularly in resource-constrained countries. The stability of children’s family life in these regions constitutes a substantial but poorly measured cost of worldwide increases in migration.

The Effects of Mortality on Fertility: Population Dynamics after a Natural Disaster

Understanding how mortality and fertility are linked is essential to the study of population dynamics. We investigate the fertility response to an unanticipated mortality shock that resulted from the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, which killed large shares of the residents of some Indonesian communities but caused no deaths in neighboring communities. Using population-representative multilevel longitudinal data, we identify a behavioral fertility response to mortality exposure, both at the level of a couple and in the broader community. We observe a sustained fertility increase at the aggregate level following the tsunami, which was driven by two behavioral responses to mortality exposure. First, mothers who lost one or more children in the disaster were significantly more likely to bear additional children after the tsunami. This response explains about 13 % of the aggregate increase in fertility. Second, women without children before the tsunami initiated family-building earlier in communities where tsunami-related mortality rates were higher, indicating that the fertility of these women is an important route to rebuilding the population in the aftermath of a mortality shock. Such community-level effects have received little attention in demographic scholarship.

Ethnic diversity, traditional norms, and marriage behaviour in Indonesia

What role do cultural norms play in shaping individual behaviour and how does this relationship change with rapid socio-economic development? While modernization and convergence theories predict a weakened relationship between culture and behaviour as individuals rely less on family and community members for economic opportunities, recent research suggests that such norms can persist and continue to influence behaviour. We explored this question for Indonesia, asking whether cultural norms for age at marriage and post-marriage residence—as embodied in local ethnicity-based laws and customs known as ‘adat’—relate to actual marriage behaviour. We demonstrate that adat norms are strong predictors of marriage behaviour, both over time and net of large increases in educational attainment. Our results suggest more generally that traditional marriage norms can persist even when a society is in the process of rapid socio-economic development.

Do Daughters Really Cause Divorce? Stress, Pregnancy, and Family Composition

Provocative studies have reported that in the United States, marriages producing firstborn daughters are more likely to divorce than those producing firstborn sons. The findings have been interpreted as contemporary evidence of fathers’ son preference. Our study explores the potential role of another set of dynamics that may drive these patterns: namely, selection into live birth. Epidemiological evidence indicates that the characteristic female survival advantage may begin before birth. If stress accompanying unstable marriages has biological effects on fecundity, a female survival advantage could generate an association between stability and the sex composition of offspring. Combining regression and simulation techniques to analyze real-world data, we ask, How much of the observed association between sex of the firstborn child and risk of divorce could plausibly be accounted for by the joint effects of female survival advantage and reduced fecundity associated with unstable marriage? Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY79), we find that relationship conflict predicts the sex of children born after conflict was measured; conflict also predicts subsequent divorce. Conservative specification of parameters linking pregnancy characteristics, selection into live birth, and divorce are sufficient to generate a selection-driven association between offspring sex and divorce, which is consequential in magnitude. Our findings illustrate the value of demographic accounting of processes which occur before birth—a period when many outcomes of central interest in the population sciences begin to take shape.

Community Destruction and Traumatic Stress in Post-Tsunami Indonesia

How are individuals affected when the communities they live in change for the worse? This question is central to understanding neighborhood effects, but few study designs generate estimates that can be interpreted causally. We address issues of inference through a natural experiment, examining post-traumatic stress at multiple time points in a population differentially exposed to the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. The data, from the Study of the Tsunami Aftermath and Recovery, include interviews with over 16,000 Indonesian adults before and after the event. These data are combined with satellite imagery, direct observation, and informant interviews to examine the consequences of community destruction for post-traumatic stress. Using multilevel linear mixed models, we show that community destruction worsens post-traumatic stress, net of rigorous controls for individual experiences of trauma and loss. Furthermore, the effect of community destruction persists over time and extends across a wide range of community types.

Engaged Parenting, gender and Children’s time use in Transnational Families: An assessment spanning three global regions

Abstract Global circuits of migration regularly separate parents from children. How families navigate this separation has changed markedly. The sharp decline in the cost of international communication makes possible new forms of transnational parenting. In many contexts, migrants are now actively engaged parents, involved in decisions, knowledgeable of childrens schooling, employment, and activities, and in some cases, even conversant face‐to‐face with children via videoconferencing. These practices, however, are not universal. We use data from surveys in three countries to document the frequency and variability of intensive, engaged transnational parenting in the diverse global regions of Asia, Africa, and the Americas. We then ask whether the organisation of childrens lives—specifically, time allocated to school homework, leisure, and household chores—varies by the degree to which migrant parents stay connected to sending homes. The gender of the migrant parent, stay‐behind caregiver, and the gender of the child emerge as explanatory factors for engaged parenting and childrens time use. However, and unexpectedly, in the Philippines, migrant mothers are less likely to practice engaged parenting. In sending households, girls in two of the three countries spend more time doing household chores than boys, but parental migration does not mitigate this difference. Although we find some evidence of more traditional gender practices, we also find exceptions that suggest potentially fruitful avenues for future research.

Gender, Power, and Emigration From Mexico

The prevailing model of migration in developing countries conceives of a risk-diversifying household in which members act as a single entity when making migration decisions. Ethnographic studies challenge this model by documenting gender hierarchy in family decisions and arguing that, in many contexts, men and women have differing views on the value of migration. We assess these perspectives using longitudinal survey data from Mexico. We show that Mexican households are heterogeneous in terms of women’s decision-making authority and control over resources, and this variation predicts the subsequent emigration of their male partners to the United States. We then use data from a policy experiment to demonstrate that an exogenous increase in a woman’s control over household resources decreases the probability that her spouse migrates. Our findings support the presence of important gender differences in how migration is valued. They also suggest that women’s role in these decisions is inadvertently underrepresented in studies of migrant families. Staying is also a migration decision, and it is more likely in homes in which women have greater authority. From a policy perspective, the results suggest that Mexican migration is influenced not only by increases in household resources but also by which members of the household control them.

Post-disaster fertility: Hurricane Katrina and the changing racial composition of New Orleans

Large-scale climate events can have enduring effects on population size and composition. Natural disasters affect population fertility through multiple mechanisms, including displacement, demand for children, and reproductive care access. Fertility effects, in turn, influence the size and composition of new birth cohorts, extending the reach of climate events across generations. We study these processes in New Orleans during the decade spanning Hurricane Katrina. We combine census data, ACS data, and vital statistics data to describe fertility in New Orleans and seven comparison cities. Following Katrina, displacement contributed to a 30% decline in birth cohort size. Black fertility fell, and remained 4% below expected values through 2010. By contrast, white fertility increased by 5%. The largest share of births now occurs to white women. These fertility differences—beyond migration-driven population change—generate additional pressure on the renewal of New Orleans as a city in which the black population is substantially smaller in the disaster’s wake.