News & Press Releases

November 30, 2022 | News | Media Coverage

Covid-19 Experts at the MPIDR

Collecting and evaluating data correctly is of great importance, especially now during the Covid-19 pandemic. As social scientists and data researchers, our demographers are currently in great demand. A selection of their media coverage. more

November 22, 2022 | News | Welcome to the MPIDR

Julia Kühne is the New Secretary for the Joint Research Lab of Demographic Data

Julia Kühne worked for many years in children's and adult education. Since October, she has been the secretary responsible for the MPIDR’s joint research area Demographic Data. She is particularly looking forward to work in an international and academic environment.

The Human Fertility Database Renewed its Website

A newly designed website for the Human Fertility Database (HFD) has been launched in early November. Along with the launch, the HFD now provides its data under a CC-BY 4.0 license.

Egor Kotov is a new PhD Student at the Laboratory of Digital and Computational Demography

Egor Kotov comes from the Higher School of Economics in Moscow, where he analyzed intra-urban commuting and its connections with urban spatial development and land use. While staying with us for the next three years, he will focus on studying the implications of human mobility for disease dynamics and inequality.

USA: Being Obese in Early Adulthood Increases the Chance of Remaining Childless at 40 and beyond

A team of researchers used longitudinal survey data from the late 1950s US birth cohort to show how sex and ethnicity relate to how weight (BMI) during early adulthood predicts later childlessness. The study was recently published in the journal “Population Studies”. more

November 16, 2022 | News | Welcome to the MPIDR

Katherine Del Salto Calderon is a new PhD Student at the Laboratory of Fertility and Wellbeing

Katherine is Ecuadorian, comes from Linköping University in Sweden and has a background in health policy. She works with us for the next three years and will focus on reproductive health access and behavior, with a special interest in alternative data sources in middle-income countries.

Marcus Ebeling is a new Research Scientist at the Laboratory of Population Health

Marcus Ebeling has conducted research at the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm on the demographic consequences of disease prevention on individuals, health care, and society. He will continue this work at the MPIDR. For him and his family, it is a return to Rostock and to the Institute; they are happy to be closer to family and friends again.

Is Facebook’s Advertising Data Accurate Enough for Use in Social Science?

Researchers of the Digital and Computational Demography Lab at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (MPIDR) and colleagues recently published a paper in the “Journal of the Royal Statistical Society: Series A” which systematically assesses the quality of Facebook’s ads data for use in social science research. They assessed the accuracy of this data by comparing self-reported and Facebook-classified demographic information on sex, age and region of residence of more than 133,000 users recruited via an online survey. Their results suggest that Facebook’s ads data can be used when additional steps are taken to validate the accuracy of the information under consideration. more

November 03, 2022 | Press Release

Falling Birth Rates in Northern Europe

Birth rates in Scandinavia used to be the highest in Europe for long, but since 2010 they have declined faster than expected, such as in Finland where they have slumped to an all-time low. A study by the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research now investigates the extent to which there are differences in fertility at the sub-national regional level.

Mental Health of Single Mothers: Why Looking at the Pathways into Single Motherhood and Later Partnership Status Matters

Separation and widowhood affects the mental health of women and those who then become single mothers have an especially long lasting and harmful impact. These are the findings in a recent study by MPIDR Researcher Mine Kühn and colleagues which analyzes up-to-date Finnish register data. more