Hybrid Format

Children experiencing parental death due to drugs and firearms in the United States, 1999 - 2020

Guest: Benjamin-Samuel Schlüter (University of Toronto)
Department of Digital and Computational Demography, November 30, 2023

Hybrid Talk Seminar, November 30, 2023 from 11am to 12pm (CEST)

Abstract

Drug-, opioid- and firearm-related mortality have been rising over the last decade in the United States (U.S.). Beyond the direct impacts of increased mortality, children are potentially doubly affected by premature adult deaths, through experiencing bereavement. We use a matrix kinship projection model to estimate children's experience of parental death due to firearms and drugs in the U.S., focusing on differences by race/ethnic groups. We estimate that the proportion of children losing a parent due to drugs increased for all racial/ethnic groups over 1999-2020. Not only different race/ethnicity face different intensity of bereavement, but also their timing of bereavement over a child's life course differs, with non-Hispanic Black father deaths due to firearms more likely to occur when children are very young. Our study can help consider the additional indirect impact these deaths have on families when designing interventions addressing the risk of death from drugs, and firearms.

About the speaker

Benjamin-Samuel Schlüter is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Bayesian Demography Lab with Monica Alexander (University of Toronto, Canada). His current research focuses on kinship demography, the impacts of climate change on population, subnational mortality estimations, and the consequences of conflict on mortality. He completed his PhD from the Catholic University of Louvain (Belgium) with Bruno Masquelier. His dissertation focused on using Bayesian hierarchical models to estimate subnational mortality.