This paper investigates how domestic violence, fertility aspirations, and women’s bargaining power shape marital stability in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Using pooled DHS data (2007, 2013/2014, and 2023/2024) and a recursive bivariate probit model, the analysis addresses the endogeneity between domestic violence and union dissolution. Results reveal an equilibrium of endurance under constraint: domestic violence sharply increases separation, whereas fertility aspirations and bargaining power exert stabilizing, yet distinct, effects. Women with high fertility ideals are less likely to exit unions, suggesting that reproductive goals act as normative anchors that discourage dissolution even in violent settings. Bargaining power, unexpectedly, protects unions in non-violent contexts but loses its stabilizing force when conflict escalates, a “conditional fragility” in which empowerment cannot counter coercive control. Interactions show that autonomy weakens the binding role of fertility ideals: for women with higher decision-making authority, these aspirations no longer dictate marital continuity. Subsample analyses reveal spatial contrasts. In rural areas, bargaining power and pronatalist norms reinforce “negotiated endurance”, sustaining unions despite adversity, while in urban contexts, empowerment supports “autonomous resilience”: it is associated with lower exposure to violence and greater union instability under violent conditions, reflecting a lower tolerance for harmful relationships but also the possibility of male-initiated dissolution. Findings underscore that public interventions must address both violence and the reproductive and structural constraints that bind women within harmful unions.
Lifespan disparity ( e^†_0 ) varies for similar values of life expectancy ( e_0^ ) owing to changes in the shares of premature and old-age mortality about threshold age on one hand, and in the composition of causes of death on the other. Decomposition analyses of e_0^+ for 24 causes of death using mortality rates from the 2021 Global Burden of Disease (GBD) study were used to assess its age-cause-specific contributions in the progression of e^†_0 during 1990–2019. The results reveal that e^†_0 values for men and women declined from 17.7 to 17.4 years in 1990–1994 to 13.2 and 12.9 years, respectively, in 2015-20l9. This decline in e^†_0 was mainly due to four diseases: respiratory infections, enteric infections, neonatal disorders, and other infectious diseases in infants, children, and childbearing age groups. On other hand, the unfavourable roles of cardiovascular and chronic respiratory diseases in the passive decline in e^†_0 have been attributed to the low threshold age. Hence, the share of premature mortality has not been sufficient for the progressive decline in e^†_0 in India, when compared with HICs/UMICs and LMICs with e_0^ in range of ± 2. Thus, the changes in e^†_0 shaped by a few age groups and selected causes of death would progress differently compared to when contributed by many age groups and causes of death. Our results suggest India should focus on programs and policies averting deaths among older adults caused by CVDs and CRDs, which may shift the threshold age upward for a leap in mortality advancement.
Research on the geographic mobility of journeypersons in Canada is growing, but less is known about the economic gains or losses associated with different forms of mobility. Using a sociology of work lens, we analyze data from the Education and Labour Market Longitudinal Platform (ELMLP) to create a sample of 423,565 journeypersons who achieved Red Seal certification between 2009 and 2020 (aged 18–65). We test whether there is an economic premium for distinct forms of mobility: employment mobility, residential mobility, and their overlap. Descriptively, the results show that movers earn substantially more than stayers. Median incomes for movers exceed those of stayers in every province except Alberta, with the largest mover advantages observed for Newfoundland and Labrador, Nova Scotia, and British Columbia. Multivariate results show that employment mobility yields the highest adjusted earnings, followed by engaging in both employment and residential mobility; in contrast, residential-only mobility is associated with an earnings penalty relative to staying. Taken together, the findings indicate that the Red Seal framework facilitates economic returns primarily when mobility connects workers to jobs across provincial or territorial lines, underscoring the value of policies that lower frictions to interprovincial employment matching.
Family formation patterns in Canada have undergone substantial change over the past century. The diverging destinies and pattern of disadvantage theses suggest that patterns of family formation have increasingly diverged between socioeconomically advantaged and disadvantaged groups. However, patterns of family formation in the Canadian context remain understudied. Canada is an important national context for testing and expanding social demographic theories because of its different context of opportunity relative to the US, which may mitigate the consequences that economic disadvantage has on individuals’ family formation trajectories. Drawing on data from the 2017 Canadian General Social Survey and using multiple sequence analysis, this paper documents changes in typical family formation trajectories for women born in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. It then examines how parental education is associated with different family formation trajectories for women from each birth cohort using multinomial logistic regression models. Results show substantial shifts in family formation trajectories across cohorts, including delayed transitions and increased diversity in sequencing. However, changes in socioeconomic stratification are uneven. The influence of parental education is not uniform across pathways; it remains concentrated in specific trajectories, particularly those characterized by early marriage and childbearing or delayed family formation, while weakening or remaining modest in others. These findings provide limited support for a straightforward “diverging destinies” pattern. Instead, they suggest a more complex and context-dependent relationship between socioeconomic background and family formation.
In 1952, the psychiatrist Erwin Stengel hypothesized that suicide becomes rarer in times when the value of life within a society is lower, when death is more common. In Canada, suicide rates and death rates present with consistent seasonality between years, fluctuating inversely with one another. However, the typical pre-pandemic seasonality seen in death rates was broken during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, as a consequence of inordinate deaths occurring at an odd time of year. This offers a unique opportunity to observe whether suicide rates were inversely disrupted. The present study models weekly Canadian suicide rates using death rates, from time series data spanning 2010 to 2019. Results indicate that suicide rates decrease on average by 0.27 standard deviations per 1 standard deviation increase in the death rate. This model is then used to predict 2020 suicide rates, using 2020 death rates. Predictions account for 11.6% of the variation in actual 2020 suicide rates. Furthermore, actual 2020 suicide rates display a negative disruption at the same time as the 2020 death rate positive disruption, and this suicide rate disruption is mimicked by our model predictions. Overall, results are interpreted as being favorable towards Stengel’s theory. As alternative interpretation, we suggest that each non-suicide-related death removes a potential suicide from the population. Overall analysis suggests that elevated death rates during colder seasons are driven by increased communicable disease transmission relative to warmer seasons, resulting in suppressed suicide rates.
