1985-1987 - Population Studies Center - University of Michigan

European Research and directed by James Millar of theUniversity of Illinois. Professors Anderson and Silver'swork has focused on issues of data quality and questionsabout family and household demography.Professor Anderson has been investigating lifecourse dynamics in the Soviet Interview Project data.She has found that although the level of female laborforce participation in this group was very high, veryfew women had uninterrupted careers. Also, earlychildbearing affected the timing of labor force entry,but was not related to reduced labor force participationover the life cycle. Data on the status of women andchild care are being used to study contingent householdand family decision-making.Professor Silver has been investigating politicalattitudes and beliefs. He has found that even thoughall the respondents left the Soviet Union, they express ahigh degree of support for many Soviet institutions,including public medical care and state control ofheavy industry. In addition, although those who hadhigher incomes in the Soviet Union were more supportiveof the regime, higher educational levels wereassociated with more skepticism and less support ofregime norms.United States: Ecological Determinants of IndividualBehavior.David Goldberg has been looking at the separatecontribution of individual characteristics and ofpopulation potentials on a number of variables in theDetroit metropolitan area in 1980 and 1981. Using aweighted sample of 1,205 individuals, ProfessorGoldberg found that for Republican Party preferencefor individuals, a measure of the population potentialof Republican Party preference had a significant effecteven after important characteristics of the individualwere taken into account. The more people who livedclose-to the respondent favored the Republican Party,the more iikely the respondent was to favor the RepublicanParty, even after the respondent's race, age, sex,and a variety of socioeconomic characteristics weretaken into account. Somewhat weaker effects ofpopulation potential measures were found for howfrequently people travelled to downtown Detroit fornon-business reasons and whether people planned tomove within the next 2-3 years, Allen Beck and BaronMoots collaborated on the project.Thailand: Socioeconomic Consequences of Fertility Declinefor the Thai Family.John Knodel is using both quantitative and qualitativemethodologies to assess the perceived and actualconsequences of the sharp reduction in fertility that hasoccurred over the last two decades in Thailand for thesocioeconomic well-being of the Thai family. Theresearch plan includes a survey, in depth interviewswith key informants, and focus group discussions. Theinvestigators are particularly interested in the impactthat reduced family size has had on the ability toeducate children, accumulation of material wealth, andwomen's labor force participation. The general strategyof the project is to compare couples with large andsmall family sizes in two districts in Thailand withdifferent social, economic and demographic settings.The project is concerned with assessing the extent towhich the rationale for the National Family PlanningProgram in Thailand has actually been confirmed byexperience, now that the program has had success inreducing fertility. This work has been supported byFamily Health International and the RockefellerFoundation.ECONOMIC-DEMOGRAPHIC INTERACTIONSCross-National:of Income.Demographic Effects on the DistributionThe effects of population growth and other demographicchanges on the distribution of income is thefocus of a continuing project by David Lam. This workhas used techniques from stable population theory toanalyze the effects of changing age structure anddifferential fertility across income classes on incomeinequality. A portion of this research was supportedby the National Academy of Sciences. An overview ofthe effects of population growth on inequality appearedin the Academy's recent report on populationgrowth and economic development. In a phase of theitWffiII••11IIPI!RDavid A. Lam and Jeffrey Miron6 Population Studies Center