Scientific Presentations

LabTalks@SocialDemography

Department Social Demography
Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (MPIDR), Rostock, Germany, December 03, 2024

1:00 PM: Talk with Aapo Hiilamo - Children’s average time in out-of-home care, number of placements and lifetime risks of entry, exit and re-entry for the synthetic cohorts of 1991-2020 in Finland

The placement of children outside their homes, known as out-of-home care (OHC), is a last-resort state intervention to safeguard children's healthy development. OHC reflects childhood adversity, is linked to worse adult outcomes, and is highly expensive. Comparing OHC at the population level across time and space is not, however, straightforward. This is because there are many dimensions that are relevant for children and their families: the likelihood of experiencing placement, the length of care, and the stability of care. Official statistical agencies report often the annual number of new placements, but changes in this measure may reflect an increased number of short placements or shifts in the age composition of the population. Birth cohort-based measures are also used, but these require long follow-up periods and describe something that may not be representative of the current state. In this study, we use multistate modeling to calculate population-level OHC metrics that are both policy-relevant and easy to understand: average time in out-of-home care, number of placements and lifetime risks of entry, exit and re-entry for synthetic cohorts. Using these metrics, we describe the OHC trends in Finland between 1991 and 2020.

1:45 PM: Talk with Rustam Tursun-zade - A new incidence-based index of within-population health inequality

Much has been done to measure within-population lifespan inequality, but less is known about population health inequality. We propose a new incidence-based index of within-population health inequality, which is inspired by e-dagger. Our index is neatly decomposable into the contributions of different life transitions. We put our index in the context of other prevalence and incidence-based measures, and we show some preliminary results obtained with Spanish SILC data.