Despite the continuous decline in fertility since the 1950s, several African nations, including Nigeria, have continued to experience population growth. Previous research has concentrated on how socioeconomic and fertility-related factors influence fertility outcomes in developing countries. It is crucial to understand the dynamics of fertility in Nigeria, a country with rapid population growth, to lower the total fertility rate (TFR), particularly in regions prone to rapid population expansion, which in turn affects the rate of development. This study sought to examine the factors influencing fertility outcomes in Nigeria. Using zero-inflated Poisson regression models, this study examined recent data from the 2018 Nigeria Demographic and Health Survey (NDHS) to determine the factors with the greatest influence on fertility in the country. The findings indicate that the sociodemographic and economic characteristics of women influence their fertility. In addition, proximate factors such as contraceptive use, marital status, and abortion were also significantly associated with fertility. Recommendations are made to the government, policymakers, and local stakeholders to maintain a national policy for citizens and development that aims to improve the education of young girls and extend their ages at first sex (and, consequently, their ages at first birth) through extended schooling. Finally, greater emphasis should be placed on promoting knowledge of the use of contraceptives.
Status characteristics including race, sexuality, and gender identity play a significant role in people's access to health and healthcare coverage. Despite documented disadvantages across these individual statuses (e.g., race), little research has investigated how the intersection of statuses affect health coverage. Drawing on an intersectional framework, this study uses data from the 2021 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System to examine the association between health insurance and the intersections of race-ethnicity, sexual orientation, and gender identity (n=206,338). This study offers three important contributions to the research literature. First, this study represents one of the first to examine the intersection of important social status characteristics and health insurance status. Second, this study examines three indicators of healthcare coverage including status (i.e., insured or not), type (i.e., public, private, employer-based, or none), and denial of coverage (i.e., insurance refused to pay for cancer treatment). Third, we investigate healthcare disparities using data representative of thirty-two states that more holistically assess people's healthcare status and allow for greater generalizability. Findings show that Hispanic straight cismen are the least likely group to have insurance. White trans adults appear to be more likely to have insurance than many other groups. Trans adults are more likely to have public insurance if they are ethnoracially marginalized. Straight Black women have high likelihoods of their insurance denying coverage. These findings highlight critical gaps in access to healthcare and myriad disadvantages in coverage. Efforts to improve population health would benefit from an intersectional lens that focuses on how multiple status characteristics shape people's access to healthcare across the life course.
This study investigates whether convergence or divergence in divorce trends occurred in two countries with common history and legislative framework measured both by transversal and cohort methods and tries to predict some short-term trends as well. Slovakia and Czechia are countries with a common history and divorce legislation, in which the post-1989 social transformation began at the same time as the start of independent development. It is therefore possible to compare retrospectively the transformation of marital dissolution over three decades in the context of social transformation as well as the development in separate state units. Despite the attractiveness of research so focused, there are surprisingly few comprehensive comparative studies of marital dissolution in such countries. Several transversal and longitudinal indicators have been calculated to compare both countries in the last three decades. A synthetic index of differentiation has been applied then. The Arima model for prediction has been applied and qualitative assumptions on divorce factors are discussed, too. Seemingly clear differences and developmental patterns in the intensity of divorce measured in a transversal way are not as evident in the case of longitudinal analysis of marriage cohorts. The reality of the transformation of family dissolution is simply more complex; the factor of the changing timing of the process - the duration of a marriage - also comes into play and cohort analysis is essential in discovering the changing divorce patterns.
Global migration, which became widespread in the second half of the twentieth century, has become not only an important factor in social transformations but has also caused significant changes in the ethno-national context. The dynamic nature of contemporary migration flows requires constant study of changes in the mechanisms and strategies of national identification and state formation. Thus, the urgency of the problem, as well as the insufficient theoretical and practical development, determined the relevance of conducting a study in this area. The study used systematic analysis, analysis and synthesis, induction and deduction, empirical approaches (document analysis, content analysis, and observation), modeling and deconstruction. The study aims to examine how migration affects national identity and state institutions, accounting for opportunities and obstacles for state-building initiatives.
Menarche is one of the first and most significant milestones in a woman's fertility lifespan. It is a biological event in every girl's life; however, its timing is influenced by several biological and socioeconomic factors. Most studies on age at menarche have been mainly concerned with describing the statuses, differentials, and determinants. Skew distributions have been applied to fit the distributional pattern of age at menarche, and results are used to construct the menarchial life table. The objectives of this research are to explain the age at menarche of women by an efficient probability model, to identify the model that best fits age at menarche of women, to determine the characteristics of age at menarche of girls described by the model, cohorts analysis, and to construct a menarchial life-table to compute the expected age of menarche of girls. A secondary data set was taken to fit the skewed probability model, and different statistical tools were used to test and validate the model's fitting. The Skew-Log-Logistic model is found to be a significant fit for menarche data, and the results are applied to formulate the menarchial life table. The average age of menarche was estimated using the life-table technique for different cohorts. The distributional pattern of age at menarche is changing from a normal to skewed curve, and the mean age at menarche has decreased for recent cohorts. The Skew Log-Logistic model is a significant fit for Nepalese females' distributional pattern of menarche data, and the results were applied to formulating the life table.
