Effects of Kin and Birth Order on Male Child Mortality: An East Asian Comparison

• In Event: 241 - Section on Evolution, Biology and Society Paper Session. Integrating Evolutionary and Biological Thinking into Sociological Inquiry

Abstract

Human child survival, like many mammals, depends on parental supervision and support. In spite of the recent advances in research on the effects of parents and grandparents on infant and child mortality, studies that directly examine sibling mortality difference according to the presence or absence of specific kin by birth order are still rare. This paper attempts to supplement this literature by using individual level panel data from three East Asian historical populations from northeast China, northeast Japan, and northern Taiwan comprising 2.1 million observations of 0.3 million individuals to examine and compare male infant and child mortality by presence/absence of parents and other kin and their interaction effects with birth order. We apply discrete-time event-history methods on 141,373 observations of 64,734 boys 0.5 – 8.5 years-old. We find that in all three populations while presence of parents is important to child survival on average, both presence of parents and presence of grandmothers favors the survival of earlier-born over later-born. These findings underline the importance of birth order in understanding differential parental and grandmother effects on sibling mortality differences.

Authors

• Hao Dong, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

• Satomi Kurosu, Reitaku University

• Wen Shan Yang, Academia Sinica

• James Lee, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology