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September 1992 - present
Publications
Publications (84)
Objective
There has been little work on the high level of mortality, noted that the time, in coal mining areas during the 1918 Influenza pandemic. Increased risk during viral infection from exposure to particulates (eg cigarette smoke, air pollution) has been studied. ApproachWe use the historic administrative data for Scotland, 1900 to 1930, with...
In this article, we investigate the accuracy of age reporting by people aged 60 and older and proxy reporting by their carers in a peri-urban area of Uganda, and analyse the factors that influence reporting by both groups. We find a high level of age heaping on terminal digits 0 and 5, indicating poor knowledge of age. Contrary to other studies, we...
Objective
In South Asia, studies show secular trends toward slightly later women's marriage and first reproduction. However, data on related biological and social events, such as menarche and age of coresidence with husband, are often missing from these analyses. We assessed generational trends in key life events marking the transition to womanhood...
Background
Public health interventions increasingly focus on changing social and physical environments. In addition to these environmental changes, populations experience their own changes, including major life events such as residential relocation. However, understanding if newcomers and settled residents are different and whether they have differ...
The migration of people affects the geographical distribution of the population and the demographic composition of areas over the short, medium and long terms. To recognise and respond to the corresponding needs and challenges, including consequences for service provision, social cohesion and population health, there is a continuing need to underst...
This paper takes, as its starting point, Preston and Haines’ observation in Fatal Years that social class was the most important influence on infant and child mortality in England and Wales in the early twentieth century. A subsequent study suggested that this could in part be due to the spatial distribution of the different classes across differen...
This paper examines the causes of infant mortality for the port town of Ipswich between 1872 and 1909. Ipswich is the only town in England for which a complete run of computer-readable, individual-level causes of death are available in the late 19th and early 20th century. Our work makes use of the ICD10h coding system being developed to contribute...
Although many contemporary demographers pay attention to historical demography, there is often a surprising lack of appreciation of the demographic circumstances and systems of the past, suggesting an implicit assumption that they are not relevant to the present or that the methods, data, and questions addressed by historical and contemporary demog...
Objective
to provide a comprehensive seasonal analysis of pregnant mothers’ eating behaviour and maternal/newborn nutritional status in an undernourished population from lowland rural Nepal, where weather patterns, agricultural labour, food availability and disease prevalence vary seasonally.
Design
Secondary analysis of cluster-randomized Low Bir...
Objective: On average, boys grow faster than girls in early life but appear more susceptible to undernutrition. We investigated sex differences in early child growth, and whether maternal nutritional status and diet differed by offspring sex during and after pregnancy in an undernourished population.
Methods: We analyzed longitudinal data from a c...
IntroductionThe Digitising Scotland project (https://digitisingscotland.ac.uk/) has transcribed all Scottish birth, death, and marriage certificates from 1855 to 1974. The linkage of these data will provide formidable challenges for linkage experts and a multitude of opportunities for health and social science researchers. Objectives and approachWe...
Avant son déclin majeur dans les années 1930, l’une des caractéristiques les plus frappantes de la mortalité maternelle en Angleterre et au pays de Galles était sa répartition géographique, avec des taux de décès pour 10 000 naissances beaucoup plus élevés dans le Nord et l’Ouest du pays que dans le Sud et l’Est. Les facteurs qui sous-tendent ce sc...
We use individual-level census data for England and Wales for the period 1851–1911 to investigate the interplay between social class and geographical context determining patterns of childbearing during the fertility transition. We also consider the effect of spatial mobility or lifetime migration on individual fertility behavior in the early phases...
As active commuting levels continue to decline among primary schoolchildren, evidence about which built environmental characteristics influence walking or cycling to school remains inconclusive and is strongly context-dependent. This study aimed to identify the objective built environmental drivers of, and barriers to, active commuting to school fo...
Several papers have primarily considered a female disadvantage in mortality as something to explain, considering a male disadvantage to be a “natural condition”. Even if, due to biological reasons, shorter life expectancy among males has been demonstrated, other factors need to be involved to explain firstly the increasing, and then the decreasing,...
Background: Early childbirth is associated with adverse maternal and child health outcomes. In South Asia, where women generally marry before having children, public health efforts need to focus on delaying marriage. Female education is widely considered the primary means to achieve this. However, it remains unclear how much education is required t...
•Over-age attendance is increasing but remains under-studied in South Asia.•Children fall behind by entering pre-primary or primary late, and by repeating a grade during/after primary school.•Rural location, thin and uneducated mothers predicted late pre-primary entry.•Educational research and interventions need to focus on the earlier time-point o...
The Own Children Method (OCM) is an indirect procedure for deriving age-specific fertility rates and total fertility from children living with their mothers at a census or survey. The method was designed primarily for the calculation of overall fertility, although there are variants that allow the calculation of marital fertility. In this paper we...
Background:
Body Mass Index (BMI) is a common outcome when assessing associations between childhood overweight and obesity and physical activity patterns. However, the fat and fat-free components of BMI, measured by the Fat Mass Index (FMI) and Fat-Free Mass Index (FFMI), may show contrasting associations with physical activity, while ethnic group...
We developed a biosocial life-course conceptual approach to investigate maternal and household predictors of secondary school dropout, and to ascertain whether the consequences of dropout differ between girls and boys. We analysed longitudinal biomedical data on 648 mother-child dyads from rural Maharashtra, India. Both maternal (low education, ear...
This article produces the first findings on changes in household and family structure in England and Wales during 1851–1911, using the recently available Integrated Census Microdata (I-CeM) – a complete count database of individual-level data extending to some 188 million records. As such, it extends and updates the important overview article publi...
This contribution examines the relationship between local population studies and the national picture by considering the example of the Victorian fertility transition in England and Wales. It begins by summarising the history of research into the fertility decline. It then describes a recent project, the Atlas of Fertility Decline, which has used t...
Peter Kirby, Child workers and industrial health in Britain, 1780–1850 (Woodbridge, Suffolk: The Boydell Press, 2013). Pages xi + 212, including figures 6 and tables 8. £19.99 paperback and ebook. - Volume 33 Issue 1 - ALICE REID
This paper provides an examination into some of the most enduring debates regarding tuberculosis mortality during the nineteenth century: those related to gender, geographic and temporal variations. We use populations reconstructed from individual census and civil register data for the period 1861 to 1901, comparing a growing urban area with a decl...
This paper provides an examination into some of the most enduring debates regarding tuberculosis mortality during the nineteenth century: those related to gender, geographic and temporal variations. We use populations reconstructed from individual census and civil register data for the period 1861 to 1901, comparing a growing urban area with a decl...
This paper examines the effect of variable reporting and coding practices on the measurement of maternal mortality in urban and rural Scotland, 1861-1901, using recorded causes of death and women who died within six weeks of childbirth. This setting provides data (n = 604 maternal deaths) to compare maternal mortality identified by cause of death w...
This paper examines the effect of variable reporting and coding practices on the measurement of maternal mortality in urban and rural Scotland, 1861-1901, using recorded causes of death and women who died within six weeks of childbirth. This setting provides data (n=604 maternal deaths) to compare maternal mortality identified by cause of death wit...
BACKGROUND Considerable regional variation existed in 19th-century infant mortality (IMR) in England and Wales. OBJECTIVE This study estimates early childhood mortality (ECMR) for over 2,000 registration subdistricts (RSDs) of England and Wales and analyses spatial and temporal variations in IMR and ECMR between 1881 and 1911. METHODS The combinati...
BACKGROUND Considerable regional variation existed in 19th century infant mortality (IMR) in England and Wales. OBJECTIVE This study estimates early childhood mortality (ECMR) for over 2,000 registration sub-districts (RSDs) of England and Wales and analyses spatial and temporal variations in IMR and ECMR between 1881 and 1911. METHODS The combinat...
In many traditional societies, women’s age at marriage acts simultaneously as a gateway to new family roles and the likelihood of producing offspring. However, inadequate attention has previously been given to the broader health and social implications of variability in women’s marriage age for public health. Biomedical scientists have primarily be...
In many traditional societies, women’s age at marriage acts simultaneously as a gateway to new family roles and the likelihood of producing offspring. However, inadequate attention has previously been given to the broader health and social implications of variability in women’s marriage age for public health. Biomedical scientists have primarily be...
The 1911 censuses of the British Isles included questions directed at currently married women, relating to the number of children they had borne in that marriage, the number of those children who were still alive and the number who had died. With the help of the demographic techniques of indirect estimation, the answers to such questions can be mad...
This paper uses detailed records relating to feeding and health for a large sample of infants born in Derbyshire in the early twentieth century to provide a more detailed and nuanced picture than has previously been possible of the extent and duration of breast-feeding, reasons for ceasing to feed and the dangers of feeding in the early twentieth c...
Introduction:
Family planning is one of the cost-effective strategies in reducing maternal and child morbidity and mortality rates. Yet in Uganda, the contraceptive prevalence rate is only 30% among married women in conjunction with a persistently high fertility rate of 6.2 children per woman. These demographic indicators have contributed to a hig...
Objectives:
Factors acting before children are born or reach school-going age may explain why some do not complete primary education. Many relevant factors relate to maternal phenotype, but few studies have tested for independent associations of maternal factors relative to those characterizing the family in general.
Methods:
Using data from a l...
Background:
Persistent high fertility is associated with mother and child mortality. While most regions in the world have experienced declines in fertility rates, there are conflicting views as to whether Uganda has entered a period of fertility transition. There are limited data available that explicitly detail the fertility trends and patterns i...
BACKGROUND: Persistent high fertility is associated with mother and child mortality. While most regions in the world have experienced declines in fertility rates, there are conflicting views as to whether Uganda has entered a period of fertility transition. There are limited data available that explicitly detail the fertility trends and patterns in...
In mortality research, much attention has been paid to the strong geographical differentials in mortality levels and in modern mortality decline, as the analysis of this geographical differentiation might hold the key to explaining the determinants of mortality change. The use of historical cause-specific mortality data has proved a challenging, al...
A large amount of the research undertaken in an attempt to discover the reasons underlying the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century mortality decline in Britain has relied on the statistics published by the Registrars General. The processes by which individual causes of death are recorded and then processed in order to create the statistics...
A maternal death is one of the most devastating of all demographic events. Fortunately maternal deaths are relatively rare, at least within developed countries, and in recent years considerable effort has been made to reduce maternal mortality throughout the rest of the world. While some of the estimates of maternal mortality published by the World...
Spousal communication can improve family planning use and continuation. Yet, in countries with high fertility rates and unmet need, men have often been regarded as unsupportive of their partner's use of family planning methods. This study examines men and women's perceptions regarding obstacles to men's support and uptake of modern contraceptives....
This is the accepted manuscript of a paper which will be published in Local Population Studies.
This paper examines causes of neonatal death in two contrasting Scottish communities in the second half of the nineteenth century. Individual death certificates allow comparison of the causes as recorded by different doctors and by lay informants. The paper finds that doctors almost always offer a medical-sounding cause of death, but that causes of...
After the passing of the 1902 Midwives Act, a growing proportion of women were delivered by trained and supervised midwives. Standards of midwifery should therefore have improved over the first three decades of the twentieth century, yet nationally this was not reflected in the main outcome measures (stillbirths, early neonatal mortality and matern...
CookHera, The long sexual revolution: English women, sex, and contraception 1800–1975, Oxford University Press, 2004, £35.00, pp. xiii, 412 (hardback 0-19-925239-4). - Volume 49 Issue 3 - Alice Reid
The article focuses on the existence and extent of living same-name siblings in England. Razzell's position is that there were no, or an insignificant number of, living same-name siblings by the end of the seventeenth century. Consequently, if, in a series of baptisms, a subsequent son or daughter is given the same name as an older sibling, then th...
JacksonMark (ed.), Infanticide: historical perspectives on child murder and concealment, 1550–2000, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2002, pp. xiii, 292, illus. £47.50 (hardback 0-7546-0318-0). - Volume 48 Issue 1 - Alice Reid
SummaryThe 1902 Midwives Act introduced training and supervision for midwives in England and Wales, outlawing uncertified-and-untrained midwives (handywomen) and phasing out certified-but-untrained (bona fide) midwives. This paper compares the numbers and practices of these two different types of birth attendant with each other, with qualified and...
This article examines the extent to which living siblings were given identical first names. Whilst the practice of sibling name-sharing appeared to have died out in England during the eighteenth century, in northern Scotland it persisted at least until the end of the nineteenth century. Previously it has not been possible to provide quantitative ev...
The sad neglect of fetal death in historical studies is attributable to both a paucity of data and definitional difficulties: Stillbirths were not registered in England and Wales until 1927 and in Scotland until 1939, and even today, countries and cultures are not wholly homogenous in their definitions of live birth, stillbirth, and miscarriage. Th...
It is well known that children born out of wedlock are a particularly vulnerable group, but the reasons why are less clear. This paper uses longitudinal demographic records (created by linking the civil registers of births, marriages and deaths to decennial censuses, 1861-1901) to investigate the extent of and reasons for the mortality penalty amon...
In early 1919 my father, not yet demobilized, came on one of his regular, probably irregular, furloughs to Carisbrook Street to find both my mother and sister dead. The Spanish Influenza pandemic had struck Harpurhey. There was no doubt of the existence of a God: only the supreme being could contrive so brilliant an afterpiece to four years of unpr...
This paper examines influences on post-neonatal mortality in Derbyshire (England) in the early twentieth century, by applying multivariate hazard analysis to a rare individual-level data set. The data allow detailed patterns of breastfeeding and weaning to be examined. The role of feeding is given special attention as a mediator between mortality a...
Bulletin of the History of Medicine 76.2 (2002) 386-387
Robert Woods is possibly the leading historical demographer of England and Wales during the civil registration period, and The Demography of Victorian England and Wales is a long-awaited synthesis of his research into a single volume. The main aim of the book is the description and interpretat...
Neonatal mortality and stillbirths are recognised to be subject to similar influences, but survival after a successful live birth is usually considered in isolation of foetal wastage. Moreover, individual-level data on age-specific influences and causes of death in a historical context are rare. This paper uses an unusual data set to compare the in...
This volume is an important study in demographic history. It draws on the individual returns from the 1891, 1901 and 1911 censuses of England and Wales, to which Garrett, Reid, Schürer and Szreter were permitted access ahead of scheduled release dates. Using the responses of the inhabitants of thirteen communities to the special questions included...
The health visiting service of England and Wales was established in the early twentieth century to improve infant and child health and survival, but it is notoriously difficult to assess its impact. This paper investigates the targeting practices of the fledgling service in the county of Derbyshire, assessing the extent and efficacy of targeting. I...
Debates concerning the origins and development of the late nineteenth- to early twentieth-century declines in marital fertility and infant mortality in England and Wales have been centred largely on the material provided by answers to the ‘special’ questions in the 1911 Census. In their published form these figures have restricted researchers to an...