Dealing with Life Course Data in Demography : Statistical and Data Mining Approaches

This paper has essentially a methodological purpose. In a first section, we shortly present demography and historical demography, the intimacy between those two disciplines and their common intellectual history, the crisis they experimented in the 1980s, and how the life course paradigm and methods have been implemented to face up the challenge of shifting “from structure to process, from macro to micro, from analysis to synthesis, from certainty to uncertainty” (Willekens, 1999, pages 2629). This retrospective look also shows impressive progresses to promote a real interdisciplinarity in population studies, family demography being probably the best example. However, we also note that the success of multivariate causal analyses has been so rapid that some pitfalls are not always avoided. In Section 2, we focus on the study of transitions. First, readers mind is refreshed about regression models, then we discuss and illustrate the problem of population heterogeneity, how it could affect results interpretation, and the interest of robust estimates and the notion of shared frailty to deal with. We also present a less popular method than event history models, however well suited for studying states observed at periodic time, the Markovian models. In Sections 3, we face the gap that we observe between standard demographic analysis and causal research, i.e. the deficit of knowledge on trajectories. The developing field of data mining provides useful tools to fill such a gap and we would like to promote their use. 1 Life course approach in demography and historical demography Probably no discipline is more dependent of an unique model than demography. This model, if not a law, is the one of the demographic transition, elaborated by Landry and Notestein in the 1930s and 1940s. It offered a comprehensive reading of past, present and future of world population, including the disparity between developed and developing countries. Such a frame outdated both geographical and chronological boarders. Two examples are especially famous. Princeton demographers studied the fertility decline in nineteenth century Europe to find solutions that could be applied to the so-called “third world” (Coale and Watkins, 2 G. Ritschard and M. Oris 1986). Louis Henry, a French demographer, was at the origin of historical demography tremendous development in the 1960s/1970s when he invented the family reconstitution methods to observe a “natural” pre-transitional fertility among the eighteenth century European rural population (Henry, 1956). Since fifty years it is quite common for demographers to work on the past and for historical demographers to work on the present, if not the future. In this paper, we stay close to this tradition, taking our illustrations indifferently in demography or historical demography. Those two disciplines share not only a foundling model but also, to a large extent, a similar intellectual history. Telling such history is of course not our purpose, but a rapid summary is important to see when and why the life course paradigm and longitudinal methods emerged. Dealing with structures and flows, demography has been a science of reconstruction and description of patterns and behaviors, through a well-established quantitative methodology, and the conviction that higher the number of observations, more accurate and possibly useful were the results (Pressat’s manuals remain classical for generations). Demography was a science of the masses, growing or stagnating, young or old, not of the individuals. In the same time, the engagement of generations of scholars was largely motivated by the central character of population issues and the location of demography at a crossroad between economy, sociology, epidemiological studies, territorial analysis, political sciences and, more recently, cultural and gender approaches. However, research and collaborations were in reality highly segmented, with a clear tendency to specialization on a geographical and/or thematic basis (typically, mortality, fertility, marriage and family formation or dissolution, migrations, structures, prospective). Demography, and to a lesser extent historical demography, hesitated between the temptation of autonomy, often associated with a closing on its quantitative core, and its disappearance within the social sciences, with in-between the development studies or the “population sciences”. A real intellectual crisis resulted from such hesitation, as well as from the frustration against segmentation, and also from a growing conscience that description, especially some quantification with a pretension of objectivity, hid and diffused ideological visions about what could be a “good” or “optimal” population (Véron, 1993). Among the many reactions, revisions and re-examinations, new approaches and new methods progressively emerged. Something that retrospectively could seem very strange but is a perfect illustration of our assertions in the preceding lines, is the discovery in the 1980s of an almost complete absence of dialogue between demography and family sociology. While family is the place where most of the demographic behaviors took place and, to some extent, are decided, “few textbooks on population contain a chapter devoted to the demography of the family. Where such chapter does exist, it is generally shorter and more superficial than those that deal with fertility, mortality, nuptiality, and migration, or with the dynamics of age structure” (Höhn, 1992, p. 3). In 1982, the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population created an ad hoc committee to develop its study, but still in 1992 the animators of this group Life Course Data in Demography 3 saw family demography as “a recent and relatively underdeveloped branch of population studies” (Berquo and Xenos, 1992, p. 8). Its development has been extraordinary in the last years and is part of a shift from macro to micro, from an emphasis on macro-economic changes as the essential determinant of demographic changes to a multi-causal multivariate approach of behaviors, from average results to the study of distributions. In a quantitative discipline, major evolutions necessarily imply to take up technical challenges. “The traditional demographic analysis of such events as births, marriages, divorces, deaths, and migration, has the advantage that numbers of these events can be related to individuals in the same age group and can, therefore, be measured more easily and included in models. The inclusion of other family members in such analyses causes difficulties because they will generally differ in age and sex, and complications are also introduced because they do not generally live together continuously” (Höhn, 1992, p. 3). Although several attempts have been done to construct a “household demography” (Van Imhoff et al., 1995), the life course paradigm clearly imposed itself. Offering both concepts and statistical methods in an explicitly interdisciplinary perspective, it deeply renew the discipline, representing a shift toward micro analysis of individual data and causal research (Dykstra and van Wissen, 1999). A first substantial gain has been the study of multiple events, marriage and first birth, or moving and starting a new job for instance, a kind of investigation that also raise the issue of event sequencing and interactions that is typically treated with event history analysis. If people have several careers that they must make compatible, their life transitions also reflect socio-economic constraints, cultural norms (about the “proper” age, sex or behavior), as well as compromises between several individual aspirations within or beyond the domestic unit. Through researches in this huge area, family demography made for sure tremendous progress during the last 20 years. Our strong feeling is that the shift has been so sudden that globally the complexity of causalities is too often under-estimated (see especially Courgeau and Lelièvre, 1993; Blossfeld and Rowher, 2002; Bocquier, 1996; Alter, 1998), as well as several technical traps. The problem is essentially that when studying a population of individuals observed along the time, since each life, product of complex and multiple interactions, is as a matter of fact unique, interpreting and generalizing from samples requires several cautions. In the next section, we remind the main event history regression models and discuss the question of heterogeneity. We cannot consider that the elaboration of indicators at an individual levels about household, family and community contexts is enough to deal with the more and more raised issue of “linked” or “interdependent” lives (Hagestad, 2003). We show the interest of robust estimates and shared frailty in that perspective. In the same section, we also present the Markovian models that are particularly useful for the study of transitions within a set of states (social status, for example) periodically observed. In the interdisciplinary perspective that is the one of life course, we consider important to go beyond the simple transitions typically studied in demography (from single to married, from a first 4 G. Ritschard and M. Oris to a possible second child, from life to death, and so on) and to investigate how, from a starting position, a destination is selected among several possible. While family dynamics and life courses are more and more open, such investigations are essential to deal with the characterization of transitions as “normal” or “nonnormal” without falling again in the trap of ideological reading (see, for example, Oris and Poulain, 2003). Indeed, we assess more globally that between aggregate descriptions and causal analysis there is an obvious deficit of research on trajectories. Regression models indicate the probability that a factor, measured by an indicator, affect a risk, but such results tell us nothing about the calendar and no more about the alternatives to this risk in life