Ingrid K Van Dijk

Lund University | LU · Centre for Economic Demography; Department of Economic History

How do early-life conditions affect adult mortality? Research has yielded mixed evidence about the influence of infant and child mortality in birth cohorts on adult health and mortality. Studies rarely consider the specific role of mortality within the family. We estimated how individuals’ exposure to mortality as a child is related to their adult...

We investigate how experiencing parental death in infancy, childhood, or adolescence affected individuals' health using two distinct measures: mortality before age 20 and young adult height. Using two complementary indicators of health enables us to gain more insights into processes of selection and the scarring of health. Employing nationally repr...

Globally, the lifespan of populations increases but the healthspan is lagging behind. Previous research showed that survival into extreme ages (longevity) clusters in families as illustrated by the increasing lifespan of study participants with each additional long-lived family member. Here we investigate whether the healthspan in such families fol...

The socioeconomic health gradient has widened in recent decades. We study how childhood socioeconomic neighborhood conditions influence gender- and cause-specific adult mortality. Using uniquely detailed geocoded longitudinal microdata for a Swedish town (1939-1967), with a follow-up in national registers (1968-2015), we apply Cox proportional haza...

The socioeconomic health gradient has widened since the mid-21st century, but the role of childhood neighborhoods remains underexplored. Most neighborhood studies on health are cross-sectional, and longitudinal research is lacking. We analyze how socioeconomic neighborhood conditions in childhood influence cause-specific deaths in adulthood. We use...

A century after the Spanish Flu, the COVID-19 pandemic has brought renewed attention to socioeconomic and occupational differences in mortality in the earlier pandemic. The magnitude of these differences and the pathways between occupation and increased mortality remain unclear, however. In this paper, we explore the relation between occupational c...

Marriage is protective of survival and contributes to healthy ageing, whereas both singlehood and widowhood are related to increased mortality and poor health. The long-term change in the mortality differentials by marital status, and its interaction with gender and social class, has not been systematically addressed in the literature. In this stud...

Using data from southern Sweden, this work analyses the development of maternal and infant health in five rural parishes and the town of Landskrona in Scania, Sweden, in the last 110 years. First, we address the overall development of maternal, perinatal and infant health using a range of indicators, such as maternal mortality, neonatal mortality,...

Mounting evidence shows that early-life adversity negatively affects morbidity and survival in late life, but knowledge is limited about effects on health in mid-life. To deepen our understanding of the long-term consequences of disease exposure in early life, we study women’s reproductive outcomes and survival. Using the Scanian Economic Demograph...

Widowhood involves many practical challenges next to the emotional impact of bereavement. Remarriage to a blood relative of a deceased spouse can often help a bereaved spouse to solve issues related to inheritance, child care, and comfort in a stressful period. A study of 15,540 widowers and 18,837 widows in the Dutch province of Zeeland—of whom ab...

We investigate how parental death in infancy, childhood and adolescence affects boys’ health using two distinct measures: mortality before age 20 and height in young adulthood. These indicators enable us to identify critical age periods at which parental loss was most harmful for health, and to gain more insights into the mechanisms at play. Employ...

Are daughters of older mothers less fertile? The human mutation rate is high and increases with chronological age. As female oocytes age, they become less functional, reducing female chances at successful reproduction. Increased oocyte mutation loads at advanced age may be passed on to offspring, decreasing fertility among daughters born to older m...

For the Netherlands, a rich new data source has become available which contains indexed civil certificates for multiple generations of individuals: LINKS. The current version of the dataset contains information on 1.7 million demographic events for the province of Zeeland in the 19th and early 20th centuries and will be extended to other provinces...

https://hdl.handle.net/10622/88ZXD8

It remains unknown how different types of sources affect the reconstruction of life courses and families in large-scale databases increasingly common in demographic research. Here, we compare family and life-course reconstructions for 495 individuals simultaneously present in two well-known Dutch data sets: LINKS, based on the Zeeland province’s fu...

Survival to extreme ages clusters within families. However, identifying genetic loci conferring longevity and low morbidity in such longevous families is challenging. There is debate concerning the survival percentile that best isolates the genetic component in longevity. Here, we use three-generational mortality data from two large datasets, UPDB...

Survival to extreme ages clusters within families. However, identifying genetic loci conferring longevity and low morbidity in such longevous families is challenging. There is debate concerning the survival percentile that best isolates the genetic component in longevity. Here, we use three-generational mortality data from two large datasets, UPDB...

Here you find a release of the standardized and coded values of 134,964 different occupational titles found in the sources used by the HSN until the 1st of July 2018. All these occupational titles have been coded into HISCO, HISCLASS, HISCAM, OCC1950 and SOCPO classifications. The process of coding of the occupational titles followed three stages:...

Research on early-life mortality in contemporary and historical populations has shown that infant and child mortality tend to cluster in a limited number of high-mortality families, a phenomenon known as ‘mortality clustering’. This paper is the first to review the literature on the role of the family in early-life mortality. Contemporary results,...

In demographic research large-scale individual-level data have become increasingly available. At the same time, it remains unknown how varying sources affect the reconstruction of individual life courses and families in databases. In this paper, we conduct individual-level comparisons of family and life course reconstructions of 495 individuals sim...

The burden of infant mortality is not shared equally by all families, but clusters in high risk families. As yet, it remains unclear why some families experience more infant deaths than other families. Earlier research has shown that the risk of early death among infants may at least partially be transmitted from grandmothers to mothers. In this pa...

This study scrutinizes gender differences in adolescent problem behaviour and its potential determinants, simultaneously taking into account the individual and contextual level, including personality, family and country characteristics. Using the 2010 EU Kids Online Survey, we estimate multilevel models on 18,027 individuals from 24 European countr...

Gender differences and deviant behaviour: differences between boys and girls in the influence of individual, family and country characteristics on deviant behaviour In this study, gender differences in adolescent problem behaviour and its possible causes on the individual and contextual level are analysed. The focus lies on differences between boys...