No meeting this weeek

[Thomas Daniel <danielt@u.washington.edu>]

Colleagues,

While there is no formal mathbio meeting this week, I would encourage
you to sneek a peek at the following (forwarded by the good Eric
Anderson)\




The Weekly Center For Statistics And the Social Sciences seminar,

Adrian Raftery (Departments of Statistics and Sociology)

                and

Fadoua Balabdaoui (Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology)

"Modeling Social Diffusion Using Geostatistics: Finding the Causes of
Fertility Decline"

Time
12:20 - 2:00pm on Wednesday, 11/15/2000
Place
209 Savery Hall


Explaining the decline of fertility in developing countries has been
one of the main foci of demographic research in the past
half-century. There are several leading explanations. One is
traditional demographic transition, or "demand" theory, developed by
Kingsley Davis in 1945, and presented in perhaps its most refined
form by Richard Easterlin in the 1980s. This says that actual
fertility is influenced in specific ways by the demand for children,
the supply of children, and the costs of fertility regulation. These
factors are in turn influenced by quantities such as the schooling of
children and infant mortality. A second leading explanation is
ideation theory, which identifies modern ideas and their diffusion as
the key determinant. Of course, all these factors may be important,
in which case identifying their relative contributions becomes the
research task.

It is hard to adjudicate between these theories, because the relevant
variables all tend to change together. In a previous study using data
from Iran in 1950-1977, we were able to make this distinction, and
found that the fertility decline in Iran was better explained by
demand factors than by ideational ones.

The goal in this project is to extend these results to other
countries, to see if they hold up on a wider scale. To that end, we
have already collected a data set giving fertility rates and posited
determinants for each of 35 countries that participated in the
original World Fertility Survey for 1950 to 1995. A key part of
ideation theory is the idea of diffusion of ideas, and this should
reflect itself in spatial correlation in our data. We also intend to
take account explicitly of missing data. We will build a Bayesian
model for the data that incorporates geostatistical ideas from
spatial statistics, and multiple imputation ideas for missing data,
and estimate it using Markov chain Monte Carlo methods. We will
compare the competing hypotheses by building statistical models
corresponding to each of them, and comparing them using Bayes factors.