Studies worldwide have established a close link between higher socioeconomic status (SES) and demographic outcomes such as lower infant and child survival. This relationship has often been studied by utilizing information on ownership of household assets. Recently, we examined the effect of a proxy for SES on child survival in Malawi using the 1987 and 1998 census data. Results showed that in 1...

Inadequate data and apartheid policies have meant that, until recently, most demographers have not had the opportunity to investigate the level of, and trend in, the fertility of South African women. The 1996 South Africa Census and the 1998 Demographic and Health Survey provide the first widely available and nationally representative demographic data on South Africa since 1970. Using these dat...

Although a high proportion of marriages in Asia are consanguineous (i.e. contracted between close biological relatives), with some notable exceptions, there is a death of demographic and anthropological literature on the association between consanguinity and fertility. This paper presents an overview of the prevalence of consanguineous marriages in selected South and Southeast Asian countries, ...

BACKGROUND Health literacy (HL) may be an important determinant of health, but this concept is largely under-researched in Albania, a transitional country in the Western Balkans which is currently undergoing major political and socioeconomic changes. We aimed to assess the sociodemographic distribution of HL in this transitional South Eastern European country aspiring to join the European Union...

The principal sources of information on the rapid fall in fertility in Kenya since 1980 are, first, the birth histories compiled in the Kenya Fertility Survey (KFS) of 1977-78 and the three Demographic and Health Surveys (KDHS) of 1989, 1993 and 1998, and, second, the data on children ever born and on births in the last twelve months obtained in the population censuses of 1969, 1979, 1989 and 1...

Results from a recent taxometric investigation of the alexithymia construct, measured by the 20-Item Toronto Alexithymia Scale (TAS-20), with English-speaking samples in Canada provided evidence that alexithymia is best conceptualized as a dimensional rather than a categorical construct. The aim of the current investigation was to attempt to generalize the outcome of this earlier investigation ...

This research uses data from the 1994-1995 Zimbabwe Aging Survey complemented by the 1999 Zimbabwe Demographic and Health Survey to examine living arrangements and conditions of older people in Zimbabwe. Living arrangements in Zimbabwe are similar to those found in other sub-Saharan African countries. Older people are likely to be living with other kin and in a variety of arrangements involving...

A survey instrument is any series of pre-defined questions intended to collect information from people, whether in person, by Internet, or any other media.1,2 Surveys are ubiquitous in health professions education research, used in approximately half of recently published articles,3 likely because of their low cost, relative speed, and (often misguided) perception that they are simple to use. A...

In 2002 a dental survey amongst 6- and 12-year-old schoolchildren (n = 832) in The Hague was carried out. The caries findings were compared with findings from earlier studies in The Hague. Caries prevalence (% of caries-free children) and caries experience (mean dmfs scores) among 6-year-old children had not changed significantly in the period 1996-2002. However, a significant increase of carie...

BACKGROUND The objective of this study was to estimate changes over time in health status and selected health behaviours during the Great Recession, in the period 2011/12, in Spain, both overall, and according to socioeconomic position and gender. METHODS We applied a before-after estimation on data from four editions of the Spanish National Health Survey: 2001, 2003/04, 2006/07 and 2011/12. ...