Demography and population health : views from above and below
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- The study of populations can be seen as taking on two forms: a top-down perspective and a bottomup perspective. The former has been the traditional perspective of demographers, working with aggregate population data to understand trends and age-patterns in birth, death, and migration. In a sense, this is viewing people as particles that ebb and flow. The latter has typically been the perspective used by epidemiologists and sociologists, who have delved into the particulars of individuals that keep us from actually being particles. These perspectives each have strengths. For the top-down view, the advantage has been in wellspecified dynamic models, enabling population forecasting. For the bottom-up view, it has been in identifying risks for particular events, such as the identification of hypertension, high cholesterol, and tobacco use as raising risk of cardiovascular disease. They also have costs, in richness of detail and in reliance upon statistical, rather than more clearly mechanistic, models respectively. The subsequent chapters explore how these two perspectives inform our understanding of populations. The first three chapters consider the top-down view. In chapter one, I consider how the the state-of-the-art model for mortality forecasting - the Lee-Carter Model - has performed since its development and how this relates (or does not) to the model's assumptions. In the second chapter, I study the male-female gap in life expectancy and how causes of death contributed differentially over specific ages to the narrowing sex difference in life span. In the third, I break apart trends in life expectancy and in life span variance - a measure of life span inequality - by cause of death and reveal how the two measures have been driven by different causes. Finally, I consider the bottom-up view. Using a variety of machine learning methods, widely used in biomedical research, I explore how they do and do not inform our understanding of the social determinants of health.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic; electronic resource; remote |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Publication date | 2016 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Associated with | Seligman, Benjamin Joseph |
|---|---|
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Biology. |
| Primary advisor | Tuljapurkar, Shripad, 1951- |
| Thesis advisor | Tuljapurkar, Shripad, 1951- |
| Thesis advisor | Cullen, Mark R |
| Thesis advisor | Feldman, Marcus W |
| Thesis advisor | Rehkopf, David |
| Advisor | Cullen, Mark R |
| Advisor | Feldman, Marcus W |
| Advisor | Rehkopf, David |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Benjamin Joseph Seligman. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Biology. |
| Thesis | Thesis (Ph.D.)--Stanford University, 2016. |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2016 by Benjamin Joseph Seligman
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
Also listed in
Loading usage metrics...