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July 14, 2023
Social media have become an integral part of everyday life. However, numerous studies have produced conflicting results on how the use of these applications affects the mental health of their users. A common assumption is that the use of many different social media platforms has a negative impact on users' well-being. Researchers Sophie Lohmann and Emilio Zagheni, Director of the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (MPIDR) in Rostock, Germany, investigated this assumption. In their study, they used a statistical technique to adjust for the fact that people who use a number of social media platforms may be different to start with. The result of the study shows that the use of many different social media platforms is not a significant risk factor for the well-being of the users. more
July 06, 2023
The number of working mothers in Germany has been rising for years, however, they find themselves constantly balancing between work and family. Research shows that being employed has a positive effect on a person's health and well-being. However, no research has examined how employment affects the well-being and health of single mothers and cohabiting mothers. Dr. Mine Kühn of Tilburg University (NL) and Dr. Christian Dudel of the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (MPIDR), together with Prof. Martin Werding of the Ruhr University Bochum, have recently investigated this question. more
May 02, 2023
Dying is often associated with extensive health and elderly care. A recent study by MPIDR Researcher Marcus Ebeling and colleagues came to this conclusion through a new way of analyzing data from the Swedish registry of the entire population. The researchers suggest that living longer may also mean spending more time dying. more
March 09, 2023
A team of researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (MPIDR) in Rostock, Germany and the University of St Andrews in Scotland estimates how long a 50-year old person in the US is going to live without a partner and/or be cognitively impaired. In their paper recently published in “Population Studies” the researchers find disparities of up to 10 years both between men and women and ethnic groups. more
March 03, 2023
Researchers at the MPIDR and University of Wisconsin-Madison developed a new measure called GAP to assess contemporary mortality inequality in the US across racial-ethnic groups. They find that current estimates based on standard metrics such as life expectancy underestimate racial-ethnic disparities in mortality. more
February 28, 2023
An international team including MPIDR Researchers is the first to offer a global and dynamic view on the migration of academics by gender. The paper recently published in PNAS finds that while female researchers were less internationally mobile than men, the gender gap has shrunk considerably over the past 20 years. more
February 17, 2023
Personality traits such as agreeableness, conscientiousness, and extraversion affect the probability of having children. MPIDR doctoral student Steffen Peters demonstrates this in his new study using longitudinal data from the German Socio-Economic Panel study. more
February 03, 2023
How long people live is less predictable and life expectancy for young people can be as much as 14 years shorter in violent countries compared to peaceful countries, according to a new study from an international team, including MPIDR Researchers. It reveals a direct link between the uncertainty of living in a violent setting, even for those not directly involved in the violence, and a ‘double burden’ of shorter and less predictable lives. more
January 23, 2023
Two researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (MPIDR) in Rostock, Germany analyzed union dissolution in 34 sub-Saharan African countries over the past four decades by applying indirect demographic techniques in a novel way to overcome the lack of data. more
January 19, 2023
A team of researchers from the Laboratory of Digital and Computational Demography at the MPIDR produced a database that contains the number of academics per country, and the migration flows and rates from 1996 to 2021. They also analyzed the relationship between emigration and economic development per country. Their findings indicate that the patterns for the migration of academics may be widely different from the population-level ones, not necessarily leading to brain-drain. more