Families and households - Demography Flashcards
What are the factors increasing and decreasing population size?
Increasing
- Birth
- Immigration
Decreasing
- Death
- Emigration
Define birth rate and show how it has changed over time.
Birth rate: the number of live births per 1,000 per year
1990: 29
2014: 12.2
What have been the ‘baby booms’ and why?
1921: end of WWI
1946: end of WWII
1960’s: contraceptive pill is made available
Define the TFR and show how it has changed over time.
The Total Fertility Rate: the average number of children women will have during their fertile years (15-44)
1964: 3
2001: 1.6
2023: 1.4
What are the four reasons for the decline in the birth rate?
- Changes in women’s position
- Decline in infant mortality rate
- Children are now an economic liability
- Child centredness
How does change in women’s position affect birth rate? Give a study.
Harper (2012): the increased education of women (GIST/WISE) is the most important reason for the long-term fall in birth rates - educated women are more likely to use family planning and see possibilities aside from mother and wife.
Give a counterpoint to the change in women’s position as affecting the birth rate.
Fuller (2011): W/C girls persist in seeing well-paying masculine jobs as ‘for us’ so its a generalisation.
How does change in IMR affect birth rate?
Harper (2012) argues that families will have lots of children if they are more likely to die so a decreasing IMR will decrease birth rate, and vice-versa.
How has the IMR changed?
1900: 154/1000
Now: 4/1000
Give two reasons the IMR has decreased.
- Improved housing and sanitation reduces infectious diseases that are more likely to harm babies
-Improved welfare services to make sure babies and families are properly taken care of
Give a counterpoint to the importance of IMR in the decreasing birth rate.
Brass Kabir (1978): the trend to smaller families did not start in rural areas, where the IMR first fell, but in rural areas
How have economics affected the birth rate?
Pre-the Children and Young Persons Act 1933, children were an economic asset to their family in the short-term, providing a livable wage. Since, they have lost that benefit and have become an economic liability which discourages childbearing.
Give a counter argument to economics in the decreasing birth rate.
IfFS (2024): higher earning women are less likely to have children, which would disagree with the idea that the cost of raising children is the main issue.
How has child centredness decreased the birth rate?
Aries (1960): As childhood is considered more important, there is a shift from quantity to quality to ensure children are adequately socialised and happy
How do changes in fertility affect the family?
Women may be able to go to work due to having less children and create more equal, dual-earning families. However, fertility is not the only factor, better-off couples may be able to have larger familes and hire childcare to supplement.
What is the dependency ratio?
The relationship between the size of the productive and dependant parts of the population, with the earnings of the former needing to support the latter.
How do changes in the IMR affect the dependency ratio
In the short-term, children are dependant so a decrease would appear to lighten the ‘burden of dependance’. However, in the long-term, fewer babies means fewer young adults and a smaller working population, increasing the burden.
What is the possible psychological effect of changes in fertility?
Fewer children may mean less siblings so childhood may become a lonelier experience, negatively affecting children.
What are two policy effects of changes in fertility?
- Less children may mean fewer schools or smaller classrooms
- Less children may mean changes in the cost of maternity or paternity leave
What is the death rate and how has it changed?
The number of deaths per 1,000 of the population per year
1900: 19/1,000
2012: 9/1,000
What is the main biological factor in the decreasing death rate?
Tranter (1966): over 3/4 of the decline since 1850 is due to cures and vaccines for infectious diseases like ditheria and tuberculosis (mainly affecting the young) and their replacement with ‘diseases of affluence’ like heart disease.
What are the four main social reasons for the decreasing death rate?
- Imrpoved nutrition
- Smoking and diet
- Public Health measures
How does improved nutrition affect the death rate?
McKeown (1972): improved nutrition accounts for up to half of the reduction, particularly in increasing resistance to and survival chances of infectious diseases (specifically TB).
Give a counterargument to improved nutrition affecting the death rate.
McKeown fails to explain why females live longer despite receiving a smaller share of food supply. Additionally, he fails to explain why deaths fro other infectious diseases like measles rose during times of improved nutrition.
How may medical improvements have led to the decline in the death rate?
Improved medical knowledge has allowed for both preventative measures, like SmokeFreeUK, and improvement in treatment, such as antibiotics and blood transfusion.
How may public health measures have led to the decline in the death rate?
More hands-on local and central government in the 20th century has led to improvements in the safety of housing, cleaner drinking water, pasteurisation of milk, etc. The Clean Air Act reduced air pollution, which had killed 4,000 people in 5 days in 1952.
How has average life expectancy changed for both genders?
Life expectancy of men is 1.8x longer in 2013, than 1900
How has infant mortality rate changed?
A baby born today has a better chance of reaching its 65th birthday than a baby born in 1900 had of reaching its first birthday.
Harper and life expectancy:
Harper argues that if life expectancy continues to grow, we will soon achieve ‘radical longevity’ with the number of centenarians 100x what it is now, in 2100.
What are the CAGE differences in life expectancy?
- Women still live 3 years longer than men, though this has shrunk from 7 years in 1900
- W/c men in unskilled jobs are 3x more likely to die before 65 than men in professional jobs
- Walker (2011): those living in the poorest parts of England die 7 years earlier, whilst disabled people die 17 years earlier
Give 2 pieces of evidence of an ageing population.
- The number aged 65 or over equalled the number of under-15s for the first time ever in 2014.
- By 2041, there will be as many 78 year olds as five year olds.
What three factors lead to an ageing population?
- Increasing life expectancy
- Declining infant mortality rate
- Declining fertility rates
How may an ageing population affect use of public services? Give a criticism.
Older people require a larger amount of care, this leads to higher amounts of ‘bed-blocking’ and occupation of public services - in some parts of the country 1/3 of beds are occupied by the old and 40% of the NHS budget is spent on over-65s.
- M/c people live longer (~7 years) and have the capability to go private so may be more likely to
How does an ageing population affect housing?
One-person pensioner households account for 1/8 households, drastically decreasing the amount of housing on the market. This becomes an impossible problem as the elderly make up an ever-larger active voting base so it is electorally unadvised to make policy like May’s ‘Dementia Tax’.
What is the effect of an ageing population on the dependecy ratio? Give a counterargument.
More old people decreases the ration between the old and those who work and take care of them, causing an economic strain - the ratio is predicted to fall by 0.4 people for every pensioner by 2033.
- This is offset by declining birth rates
- The old aren’t necessarily economically dependent, they have to wait till 66 to access state pensions
How is ageism a feature of modernity?
Modernists argue that our identity and status are based on our role within production, which they lack as the retired - this gives them a dependent status and a stigmatised identity.
Phillipson (1982) and ageism:
From a marxist perspective, ageism is a product of capitalism disrgarding the elderly as incapable of contributing to production, leaving them in the hands of (often female) relatives.
What is the postmodern view on age?
In a postmodern world, the fixed, orderly stages of life have fallen apart due to things like people getting married older, this provides people with greater choice.
What is the postmodern view on the ‘silver economy’?
Postmodernity changes the key to our identity from production to consumption, this creates a market of ‘body maintenance’ for the old to create their own identities and breaking down stereotypes of the elderly and decreasing ageism.
Hunt (2005) and the old:
Postmodernity now means we can choose a lifestyle and identity regardless of age: our age no longer determines who we are or how we live.
What other two postmodern processes undermine ageism?
- The centrality of media now displays positive aspects of elderly lifestyles
- The emphasis of surface features allows the elderly, through anti-ageing products, to write their own identities.
Give two criticisms of the postmodern perspective on ageism.
Pilcher (1995) argues that postmodernists fail to account for inequalities:
- Poorer elderly have a lower life expectancy and often suffer infirmity and poverty, affecting ‘identity writing’
- Women have lower pensions due to career breaks and lower wages, they are also subject to sexist ageism, with use of phrases like ‘hag’
Age concern (2004) and ageism:
More people (29%) reported suffering age discrimination than any other form
Hirsch (2005) and policy:
An ageing population will need to be addressed by multiple policies:
- They can be financed by paying more from our savings and taxes while we are working, or by working for longer, or both.
- housing policy may need to encourage elderly to ‘trade down’ to free up housing
Give the rough timeline of immigration to the UK.
- 1900-1945: largest group was the Irish, mainly for economic reasons, followed by Euorpean Jews
- 1950’s: black Caribbean immigrants
- 1960’s-70’s: South Asian and East African Asians immigrants
- 1973-2016: series of immigration and nationality acts that restrict immigration (of coloured people) aswell as the UK joining the EU, causes only 1/4 of immigrants to the Uk to be non-white in 1980
What are the main reasons for emigration?
- ‘push’ factors: reasons to leave, like recession at home
- ‘pull’ factors: reasons to come, like higher wages
When was net migration at its peak?
Year ending June 2023: 906,000
How do immigrants increase the population?
Their fertility rates are generally higher, with UK born women at 1.9 in 2011 and non-UK born women at 2.2.
How does immigration affect the age structure?
- Directly: immigrants are generally younger - the average age of a British passport holder is 41, for non- it is 31
- Indirectly: they produce more children
How do immigrants affect the dependency ratio:
- They may decrease it because they are younger and working; additionally many older immigrants return to their country of origin to retire
- They may also increase it because they have more children - however, the longer a group stays in the UK, the closer their fertility rate comes to the average
Define globalisation.
The idea that barriers between societies are dissappearing and societies and people are becoming increasingly interconnected.
What are the three effects of globalisation on migration?
- Acceleration
- Differentiation
- Feminisation
How has migration been ‘accelerated’?
Migration is happening at an unprecedented speed: in 2023, 1.2 million people immigrated to the UK, this was around 54,000 in the early 90’s. Around 281 million people immigrated globally in 2022.
How has globalisation caused ‘differentiation’ in migrants?
Pre-globalisation, the types and orgins of migrants was quite narrow: legal economic migrants from commonwealth countries. Globalisation increased the proportion of migrants coming to the UK for non-economic reasons, like education or rights, and from where, such as EU member nations.
In 2013, how many UK-born and China-born postgraduate students were there?
UK: 23%
China: 26%
Vertovec (2007) and ‘super-diversity’:
Globalisation has led to an increase in the types of migrants: legality, orgin, cultures. He calls this ‘super-diversity’.
Cohen (2006) and the three types of immigrant:
- Citizens: those with full citizenship rights, more difficult since the 1970’s
- Denizens: priveliged foreign nationals welcomed by the state
- Helots: those that are deeply exploited in their migration, those legally tied to employers, the trafficked, illegal immigrants.
What is the globalisation of the gender division of labour?
Female migrants are increasingly fitted into patriarchal stereotypes about the role of women in care and sexual gratification.
Ehrenreich and Hochschild (2003) and the delegation of labour to female migrants:
Care, domestic, and sex work is increasingly being done by women from poorer countries, as a result of several trends:
- Expansion of the service industry calls for more female labour
- Western women are now less illing to perform domestic labour, having worked
- Western men remain unwilling
- State fails to provide adequate childcare
Shutes (2011) and adult care nurses:
40% of adult care nurses are migrants, most being women.
How has emotional labour been transferred to female migrants?
Migrant nannies provide care and affection for their employer’s children, at the expense of their children in their home country.
Eade (1994) and hybrid identities:
Second generation immigrants rank aspects of their identity: Muslim first, the Bengali, then British. These people often face opposition from members of these groups as ‘not one of us’.
Eriksen (2007) and transnational identities:
Globalisation has led to less people permenantly settling, moving around and forging identities that don’t belong to specific cultures, sustaining global ties through technology or seeing themselves as more connected to other migrants than their home country.
Outline the first state policy approach to immigration.
Assimilation was the attempt to make immigrants ‘like us’ by adopting our language and values - it was widely panned as many imigrants wish to maintain their culture as a source of identity.
Outline the second state policy approcah to immigration.
Multiculturalism understands that immigrants may wish to maintain their own culture and shift British society around it.
What two types of multiculturalism did Erikson (2007) distinguish:
He argued that, although the state is fine with superficial change (shallow diversity), like making the national dish chicken tikka, it’s hesitant to make bigger changes (deep diversity), like accepting veiled women.
What event deeply affected immigration policy in the West?
9/11 caused many nations to swin back to assimilationism, demanding they ‘fit in’ or become suspect of terrorist intent; for example, veiling is illegal in public in France.
Castles (2000) and assimilationist policies:
Assimilationist policies are counterproductive: by making them ‘like us’, you other immigrants and often embolden their cultural differences. The state often responds with ‘enemy within’ policy that further subjugate minorities, defeating the whole point of the policy.
Castles and Kosack (1973) and dividing the W/C:
Assimilationist policies encourage the W/C to see immigrants as responsible for social problems like uneployment, maintaining capitalism by implying that the system is not inherently destructive, rather its’ their fault.
