Research Group
Kinship Inequalities
At a Glance
Projects
Publications
Team
Project
The Demography of Bereavement: Quantifying the Dynamics of Kin Loss
Diego Alburez-Gutierrez, Sha Jiang
Detailed Description
Mortality research has traditionally treated death as an individual event measured through demographic rates. While this approach is essential for monitoring population-level mortality, it reveals little about how mortality is experienced by individuals. In practice, people encounter death not as a statistical rate, but rather through the loss of members of their social networks. This insight has motivated the emerging demography of bereavement, which seeks to quantify the structure and dynamics of kin loss using demographic methods.
The loss of kin has long been recognized as a major life event with wide-ranging and long-lasting implications for individuals' physical and mental health. Bereavement can affect individuals differently depending on the life stage when it is experienced: Losing a parent at a young age has different consequences than losing a child in old age. Despite a sizeable literature on the individual-level effects of bereavement, which mainly focuses on orphanhood and widowhood, we know relatively little about how common bereavement is, at which ages it occurs, and how many people experience it across populations and over time.
This project applies methods from kinship demography to characterize patterns of bereavement at the individual and population levels. It addresses questions such as: At what ages do women experience the loss of children? How many people lose kin each year due to drug overdoses? What proportion of a population have ever lost members of their extended family due to conflict-related mortality? In tackling these questions, the project seeks to address a significant gap in the demographic literature, in which bereavement has received comparatively little systematic attention despite its broad implications for population health.
The project also develops a methodological toolkit for quantifying and describing bereavement that can be applied across contexts. This includes descriptive indicators that quantify the timing and magnitude of kin loss across the life course, as well as measures to characterize bereavement at the population level. The latter focus on two complementary dimensions: the structure of kin loss, which refers to the age-sex composition of the bereaved population at a given point in time; and the dynamics of kin loss, which captures how that composition shifts in response to demographic change. The project relies on descriptive analyses of microdata from genealogical sources, administrative registers, and household surveys, as well as demographic analyses applied to aggregate data. The latter are supported by the DemoKin R package, which is developed and maintained by members of the Kinship Inequality Research Group.
Aging, Mortality and Longevity, Data and Surveys, Demographic Change, Intergenerational Relationships, Life Course
Colombia, Guatemala, USA, World
Publications
Acosta, E.; Alburez-Gutierrez, D.; Gargiulo, M.; Torres, C.:
Population and Development Review, 1–38. (2026)
Alburez-Gutierrez, D.:
Estudios Demográficos y Urbanos 41:e2495, 1–31. (2026)
Alburez-Gutierrez, D.; Acosta, E.:
In: De Gruyter handbook on conflict and health, 445–458. Berlin: De Gruyter. (2026)
Alburez-Gutierrez, D.; Acosta, E.; Zagheni, E.; Williams, N. E.:
Science Advances 10:30, 1–12. (2024)
Alburez-Gutierrez, D.:
Demography 59:3, 1173–1194. (2022)
Alburez-Gutierrez, D.:
Revista Análisis de la Realidad Nacional 10:208, 91–104. (2021)
Alburez-Gutierrez, D.:
MPIDR Working Paper WP-2021-003. (2021)
Alburez-Gutierrez, D.:
Demographic Research 40:23, 627–656. (2019)
Leone, T.; Alburez-Gutierrez, D.; Ghandour, R.; Coast, E.; Giacaman, R.:
Conflict and Health 13:36, 1–15. (2019)
Alburez-Gutierrez, D.:
London: London School of Economics and Political Science. (2018)