Objectives
Shortages of healthcare professionals are an ongoing challenge, but administrative data systems typically lack systematically collected data on occupation. This study outlines the development of data sharing agreements with occupational licensing authorities in New Brunswick, Canada, and uses resulting linked data to study the employment and retention decisions of professionals.
Methods
We describe engagements with the licensing authorities of three regulated occupations - registered nurses, paramedics and social workers - that led to the development and approval of data sharing agreements with each authority. We focus particular attention on data safeguards and the role of those authorities in the subsequent use of their data. We then outline the data sharing and linkage processes that combined occupational regulatory data with postsecondary education data and population registry data drawn from public health insurance records. Finally, we present results on the employment and retention outcomes of individuals licensed to practice in these occupations.
Results
We engaged with senior administrators in the licensing bodies for three regulated health occupations in NB to identify priority questions and challenges around recruitment and retention of individuals in those occupations, including consideration of new pathways to licensure such as practice-ready assessment. These discussions led to the development of formal data sharing agreements between the licensing bodies and our organization, a provincial university-based data custodian, that involved the transfer of identifiable, linkable person-level registry information. Separate analyses were undertaken of employment and retention decisions of individuals in each occupation. Common themes identified for each occupation include significant rates of exit within five years of commencing work for those individuals not originally from NB, but not for NB-born individuals, even those who were educated outside the province.
Conclusion
Regulatory data from licensing bodies is a valuable source of information on employment in specific occupations of interest when broader population-level systematic collection of data on occupation of employment is unavailable. Linked person-level data is crucial for understanding entry into and exit from health occupations facing chronic shortages.
Lena Wagner, Stefania Molina, Enrique Alonso-Perez
et al.
Abstract This study adopts a dyadic perspective to explore how parental partnership quality relates to the wellbeing of children living with both biological parents versus those with a biological parent and a stepparent. We apply multivariable linear regression and a mediation analysis on dyadic data from the German Panel Analysis of Intimate Relationships and Family Dynamics (pairfam) to understand the relationship between family structure, step- and biological parents’ partnership quality, and children’s self-reported wellbeing, operationalised over the Strength and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ-scores). We differentiate two separate dimensions of parental partnership quality, namely the frequency of conflict and esteem between the (step-) parents. The results show that children living with a stepparent exhibit higher total difficulties scores as compared to children living with both their biological parents. However, parental conflict occurs less and esteem more frequently in stepfamilies than in nuclear families. Mediation analysis indicates that frequency of esteem between parents partially mediates the impact of family structure on SDQ-scores. Our analysis suggests that the negative effect of living with stepparents on children’s social and behavioural problems is slightly mitigated by increased parental esteem in these unions.
Phil Yule, James Hartley-Binns, Franziska Brunner
et al.
Objectives
Administrative data hold great potential for generating evidence for policy supporting issues and government missions. Our initial explorations typically examine whether the variables and indexes within the data held on the Integrated Data Service (IDS) provide a viable way to link this data, giving new policy insights to address issues.
Methods
Within IDS we essentially have three major spines, one Demographic index is basically a spine of all people in the UK, the Business index for businesses and the Address index covers all UPRN level addresses.
The interesting part, of course, comes as a result of linking between those spines with data like the Census 2011/2021, Births, Labour Force Survey and HMRC’s PAYE RTI to name a few.
This potentially unlocks the answers to policy questions from across government, vis-a-vis, household composition, or health and educational outcomes and much, much more.
Result
The IDS is a cross-government initiative, designed to transform the way de-identified data is made available for vital research and decision-making about our society and economy. Working collaboratively and using the power of linked data within the IDS, with key datasets acting as the spine of this research, we plan to provide policy makers with robust and collaborative evidence, to inform the decisions made across UK to improve people’s lives. This is an opportunity to engage with the research community and explore a new approach for IDS and ONS’s TRE offering.
For example, we have recently commenced some fascinating research around child fuel poverty and this will accelerate throughout 2025. By the time of the conference, interesting insights and analysis will be ready to share with delegates.
Conclusion
This project improves understanding of Britain’s fuel poverty, the types of homes and households with children affected, economic drivers and geographic areas most impacted. Policy interventions, such as social tariffs, to alleviate hardship form part of the analysis. In time, health and educational outcomes could form part of iterative research.
Previous research indicates that mothers base the length of their childcare leave on individual opportunity costs. While workplace dynamics and peer influences may affect the duration of the leave, empirical evidence remains inconclusive. This study investigates the association between childcare leave length and workplace characteristics, as well as peer influences in the Finnish institutional context. In Finland, mothers can extend their earnings-related childcare leave with a flat-rate home care allowance until their child turns three years old. At the same time, they are entitled to subsidised day care, allowing them to choose the length of their childcare leave. Our results show that, in the gender-segregated Finnish labour market, the length of childcare leave among mothers varies based on employment sector, number of employees, peers’ leave length, and the share of women in the workplace.
Social Sciences, Demography. Population. Vital events
BACKGROUND: The analysis of migrants’ preferences on the timing of fertility offers insights on how the migration experience and the contextual characteristics at destination might shape migrant women’s expectations and behaviors. OBJECTIVE: This paper explores the ideal age at first birth among Spanish and foreign-born women in Spain and its gap in relation to the actual age at first birth among those who are mothers. METHODS: We use the 2018 Spanish Fertility Survey to study respondents’ ideal age at first birth and the gap between ideal and actual age – whether a postponement or an advancement. We analyze the variation of the gap by age at arrival into Spain and the motherhood status at migration, together with contextual and sociodemographic characteristics. RESULTS: Migrants report an earlier ideal age for having their first child than do natives. Migrants from Africa and Western Europe are more likely to have had children after their ideal age, while on average migrants from Latin America and Eastern Europe became mothers earlier than desired. In addition, both migrants who arrived as children and those who were already mothers on arrival report a negative gap (advancement of motherhood), while adult women who were childless at arrival report a positive gap (postponement of motherhood). CONCLUSIONS: Preferences on the ideal timing of fertility among migrant women display important differences by origin, age at arrival, and motherhood status at migration. We posit that the socialization and adaptation hypotheses explain the gap between ideal and actual age at first birth of child migrants and migrant mothers, while the interruption and adaptation (and perhaps selection) hypotheses are likely behind the fertility gap of adult migrants who become mothers after migration. CONTRIBUTION: This study provides new empirical evidence in the underexplored area of migrants’ ideals concerning fertility timing and the gap between ideals and behaviors.
Objectives
Linking large-scale datasets is challenging due to the computational power required. This research explores using Locality-Sensitive-Hashing (LSH) as a blocking method to reduce the computational complexity when linking large administrative datasets. LSH hashes similar data into ‘buckets’, thus reducing the search space and processing power required to find links.
Methods
A gold-standard linked dataset was used during method development. Test datasets were made using samples of gold-standard matches and non-matches, then blocked using LSH.
Various LSH parameters including shingle length, signature length, band size and number of matching bands were tested. Precision and recall were used to find optimal parameters for identifying good candidate pairs, with 100% recall and >20% precision being desirable.
Alternative formats for date of birth, postcode and gender variables were tested, with additional characters used to simulate agreement weighting.
Results
Results as of spring 2023 are promising, with the caveat that currently only small datasets have been tested. The LSH method with optimal parameters creates ~9,000 candidate pairs whilst maintaining recall of 100% (i.e., all true matches are included in the candidate pairs) and precision of 27.6%. In contrast, our traditional deterministic blocking method using the same variables creates ~70,000 candidate pairs, and a cartesian product creates over 23.4 million candidate pairs. We have therefore shown that LSH can be used to create a significant reduction in the search-space size.
Furthermore, the method easily handles alternative names, postcodes, etc. that may be present in longitudinal data or composite datasets, with no need to account for different possible combinations of variables.
Conclusion
Current research has shown that LSH can be used to drastically reduce the search space when blocking for data linkage. Using variable formatting to prioritise agreement for specific sections e.g., of postcode, has overcome a potential downside of LSH. Further research on variable formatting, parameter optimisation and testing of the method at scale is ongoing.
Germany is currently among the 10 oldest countries in the world, as measured by the share of population aged 70 years and over.With the baby boomer cohorts of the 1950s and 1960s having started to reach retirement ages, a new phase of ageing is about to take place. In this debate piece, we argue that investments in human capital at any age and at any stage of the life course are indispensable for dealing with an ageing population. Investments in early education are most effective and efficient, as early skills beget later skills. We show that in an ageing society, it is most efficient to invest in children from the very beginning to develop their full human potential, and to ensure that no child is left behind. Moreover, investments in early education programmes have benefits in addition to those directly related to children, including benefits related to fertility, maternal employment and the integration of parents with a migration background. Globally, more and more countries are faced with increasing proportions of older people and decreasing proportions of working-age people in their populations. Thus, what we describe here for Germany can in many respects be transferred to other country contexts.
The Healthy Life Years (HLY) indicator is the official European Union indicator and a cornerstone of many health policies used in over 15 countries in the EU region to set national health plans and monitor targets. It is also used to investigate trends over time in the proportion of total life years spent in good or poor health, socioeconomic inequalities in health and mortality and the male-female health survival paradox. Based on the Global Activity Limitation Indicator (GALI) included in the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC), a great amount of effort has been directed at harmonising and making HLY comparable across countries. Nonetheless, the characteristics of the age-specific prevalence distribution are still rarely accounted for, regardless of the fact that patterns of prevalence often fluctuate considerably by age. In addition, the impact of assumptions used at very young ages on HLY estimates are seldom discussed, despite the fact that the majority of policies and initiatives at the EU level use HLY at birth, while data on health is only available after age 16. In this paper, we assess whether smoothing the age-specific prevalence distributions by different methods, extrapolating to older ages and changing assumptions at younger ages affect HLY estimates. Overall, assumptions made before age 15 are the most important and affect women and men differently, thus affecting HLY at birth for some countries. Estimates at age 65 are very slightly impacted. Generalised linear models (GAMs) seem promising for harmonising and extrapolating to older ages, while using polynomials or aggregating into 5-year age groups seem best for younger ages. As most EU policies use HLY at birth and by sex for developing and monitoring health policies, caution is needed when estimating HLY at birth.
* This article belongs to a special issue on “Levels and Trends of Health Expectancy: Understanding its Measurement and Estimation Sensitivity”.
Urban groups. The city. Urban sociology, City population. Including children in cities, immigration
Population Politics in the Tropics explores colonial population policies in Angola between 1890 and 1945 from a transimperial perspective. Using a wide array of previously unused sources and multilingual archival research from Angola, Portugal and beyond, Samuël Coghe sheds new light on the history of colonial Angola, showing how population policies were conceived, implemented and contested. He analyses why and how doctors, administrators, missionaries and other colonial actors tried to grasp and quantify demographic change and 'improve' the health conditions, reproductive regimes and migration patterns of Angola's 'native' population. Coghe argues that these interventions were inextricably linked to pervasive fears of depopulation and underpopulation, but that their implementation was often hampered by weak state structures, internal conflicts and multiple forms of African agency. Coghe's fresh analysis of demography, health and migration in colonial Angola challenges common ideas of Portuguese colonial exceptionalism.
Introduction
Worldwide large cohort studies have invested in community engagement to promote studies and aidrecruitment. HealthWise Wales, a national population study, aims to create a register of ‘researchready’ participants and provide long-term follow up data on health behaviours, outcomes andwider social and environmental determinants. Public involvement and engagement was key to thedevelopment of HealthWise Wales. We describe how a model for promoting HealthWise Wales wasco-produced with members of the public.
Methods
Members of the public were invited to take part in a workshop, either in North or South Wales,to discuss public involvement in long-term cohort studies. Information on community engagement,projects that had used the concept of "citizen scientists" to promote involvement, and other largelongitudinal studies was provided to 15 members of the public prior to the meeting. Eight ofthese attended the workshops, to explore the concept of citizen scientist and how it may relateto HealthWise Wales.
Results
Data from two workshops was used to draft a protocol for involvement that was reviewed and refinedby members of the public. The protocol describes two levels of public involvement, HealthWise WalesChampion or Supporter. The Champion is a more formal role that requires promoting the projectat public events, whereas Supporters pledge to promote the study to friends and family. Trainingwas provided to 17 of the 26 members of the public who had expressed interest in becoming HWWChampions. Twelve trained Champions attended 41 events to promote the study and collect ’consentto contact’ forms from members of the public.
Conclusions
It is possible to develop a model of community engagement with members of the public to promoteand raise awareness of a national population study in Wales. It is essential that adequate resourceis provided to support the concept.
<b>Background</b>: Age-specific migration intensities often display irregularities that need to be removed by graduation, but two current methods for doing so, parametric model migration schedules and non-parametric kernel regression, have their limitations. <b>Objective</b>: This paper introduces P-TOPALS, a relational method for smoothing migration data that combines both parametric and non-parametric approaches. <b>Methods</b>: I adapt de Beer's TOPALS framework to migration data and combine it with penalized splines to give a method that frees the user from choosing the optimal number and position of knots and that can be solved using linear techniques. I compare this method to smoothing by model migration schedules and kernel regression using one-year and five-year migration probabilities calculated from Australian census data. <b>Results</b>: I find that P-TOPALS combines the strengths of both student model migration schedules and kernel regression to allow a good estimation of the high-curvature portion of the curve at young adult ages as well as a sensitive modelling of intensities beyond the labour force peak. <b>Conclusions</b>: P-TOPALS is a useful framework for incorporating non-parametric elements to improve a model migration schedule fit. It is flexible enough to capture the variety of profiles seen for both interstate and regional migration flows and is naturally suited to small populations where observed probabilities can be highly irregular from one age to the next. <b>Contribution</b>: I demonstrate a new method for migration graduation that brings together the strengths of both parametric and non-parametric approaches to give a good general-purpose smoother. An implementation of the method is available as an Excel add-in.
The present paper attempts to develop a new model by considering various indicators of different types of land degradation or desertification. These types include water erosion, soil salinity, vegetation degradation, and lowering of ground water table. The indicators can be used to find areas with higher rates of degradation which are called Potential Risk Areas (risky zones) in this paper, and can also be used to estimate the probability that degradation will increase in these areas. The Mond river basin, located in the southern part of Iran, has been selected as a test area to assess the risk and kind of desertification. For this purpose two sub basins of the Khormuj and Khane-Zenian & Siakh-Darengun have been chosen for detailed study as these two provide enough variation in climatic conditions like rainfall and topography. The different kinds of data gathered from records and published reports of the different governmental offices of Iran have been used for this purpose. The thresholds for the severity classes of indicators have been established and then the hazard map for each indicator of types of desertification has been prepared in a GIS. The risk maps of water erosion, soil salinization, lowering of water table, and vegetation degradation have been produced for both sub basins. Areas on the maps are assigned to risk classes on the basis of risk scores derived by considering the cumulative effects of all indicators overlying the area in the GIS. It was possible to distinguish the areas under ‘actual risk’ from areas under ‘potential risk’ of desertification types. Also areas under potential risk are classified to subclasses with different probability level to show a statistical picture of risk in future. The final map of risk of desertification is produced by overlaying all four maps of degradation types. Between the two basins the overall environmental condition in the Khormuj sub basin is worse. Results show that potential risk areas are much widespread than areas under actual risk in the upper reaches (of both sub basins) of Mond basin, indicating further threat of land degradation or desertification in the future. The percent of areas under actual risk are much more extensive in the lower reaches (Khormuj sub basin), indicating the higher degradation at present. It is hoped that this attempt using GIS will be found applicable for other regions of the world.
Introduction
While some comparative work has provided evidence for a universally positive impact of built environment features that promote physical activity, less is known about chronic diseases and hospitalization among different social contexts and health care systems. Parallel international linkage efforts present an opportunity to study health impacts of the built environment.
Objectives and Approach
This study compares the impact of neighbourhood environments on health outcomes for patients with type 2 diabetes (T2D) in two countries. Neighborhood-level measures for walkable environments were derived for Canada and Wales using Geographic Information Systems. Hospitalization admissions from routine data sources and linked survey data responses (from the Welsh Health Survey and Canadian Community Health Survey) allow for the generation of population-based descriptive statistics on socio-demographic information, self-reported health, diagnostic patterns, and health care use. We examine the feasibility of investigating contextual differences in walkable environments, T2D, and hospitalization between Wales and Canada.
Results
Data linkage in respective privacy protecting safe havens in the Canada Research Data Centre Network (CRDCN) and the Wales Secure Anonymised Information Linkage (SAIL) Databank show promise for a comparative study, enabling parallel modelling of environmental and socio-demographic factors with hospitalization data. Both the Canadian and Welsh surveys ask respondents about their current diabetes status, allowing us to compare hospitalization rates and neighborhood effects of those who report having diabetes with the those who do not. Moreover, the linking of survey responses and similarity in geographic scale permitted consistent measurement of walkable environments across countries. Key administrative variables have been identified relating to health and behaviors, such as socio-demographic information, smoking status, and body mass index, and hospitalization metrics in both countries are commensurable.
Conclusion/Implications
The generation of comparable linked datasets, built environment indicators and comparative research for T2D patients will have wider implications for international assessment of the impacts of environment on chronic diseases, and the hospital burden associated with these conditions.
Michal Jeníček, Hana Beitlerová, Martin Hasa
et al.
The aim of the article is to give a review of methods applied for modelling the snow accumulation and snowmelt and to give a description of main processes governing the runoff from the snowpack. The progress in the understanding of processes running in the snowpack is documented both by worldwide results presented in many studies and by the results achieved by the authors in the selected small experimental catchments in the Czech Republic. The research is focused on 1) measuring the snowpack and analysing its spatial and temporal distribution, 2) assessing the role of different physical-geographical factors on snow accumulation and melting, 3) testing methods for interpolation of measured point data into area, and 4) modelling the snow accumulation and snowmelt in the local and regional scale. The main findings of the research show various ways of behaviour of snowpack accumulated in the forest and open areas in experimental catchments and show the most suitable interpolation methods taking into account one or more independent variables (slope, aspect, altitude, vegetation) for calculating the dependent variable (snow water equivalent, snow depth). The presented results also confirm the known problems with applying temperature-index snowmelt model, mainly for modelling the situations when the air temperature fluctuates near zero and for modelling the diurnal fluctuation of the snowmelt runoff.
<b>Modelování akumulace a tání sněhu – přehled současných přístupů a výsledků</b>
Tání sněhu způsobené vysokými teplotami vzduchu doprovázené kapalnými srážkami je v České republice častou příčinnou vzniku povodně. Cílem příspěvku je popsat hlavní procesy, které ovlivňují odtok ze sněhové pokrývky a poskytnout přehled o metodách, které jsou v současné době používány pro modelování akumulace a tání sněhu. Pokrok v pochopení procesů probíhajících ve sněhové pokrývce dokumentují jednak četné zahraniční výzkumy, jednak výzkumy, které byly provedeny autory textu na malých experimentálních povodích v horských oblastech České republiky a jejichž souhrn je v textu uveden. Výzkum autorů se zaměřuje na 1) měření charakteristik sněhové pokrývky a analýzu její prostorové a časové distribuce, 2) hodnocení role vybraných fyzicko-geografických faktorů na akumulaci a tání sněhu (sklon a expozice svahu, typ vegetace), 3) testování metod prostorové interpolace bodově měřených charakteristik sněhu a 4) modelování akumulace a tání sněhu v lokálním a regionálním měřítku. Ve sledovaných povodích ukazují hlavní výsledky výzkumu na rozdílné chování sněhové pokrývky akumulované v lese a na otevřených plochách, kdy v lese dochází k nižší akumulaci sněhové pokrývky a také k jejímu pozvolnějšímu tání než v případě otevřených ploch. Pro interpolaci bodových měření sněhu se ukazuje jako nejvhodnější použití metod, které do výpočtu neznámé závislé proměnné (výšky sněhu, vodní hodnoty sněhu) zahrnují jednu nebo více nezávislých proměnných, například nadmořskou výšku. Dosažené výsledky také potvrdily známé problémy s aplikací metody teplotního indexu (degree-day), především obtížnost modelování vodní hodnoty sněhu a odtoku ze sněhu v podmínkách teploty vzduchu kolísající kolem 0 °C. Problémy také nastávají při modelování denního chodu tání sněhu způsobeným vysokým úhrnem krátkovlnného záření a výrazným denním chodem teploty vzduchu (přes den kladná teplota vzduchu, v noci záporná teplota vzduchu). V těchto případech by bylo přínosnější použití metod založených na výpočtu energetické bilance sněhu. Metoda degree-day naopak uspokojivě modeluje situace s pozvolným přibýváním sněhu bez častých oblev a následné tání sněhu způsobené vysokými teplotami vzduchu a kapalnými srážkami.