Early life socioeconomic conditions in rural areas and old-age mortality in twentieth-century Quebec.

This study examines the effects of early life socioeconomic and residential conditions on adult mortality. The family and residential details of children living in rural areas of Quebec, Canada, in 1901 were linked to their subsequent ages at death using a database compiling information from the 1901 Canadian Census and Quebec vital statistics registers. Survival analysis results suggest that males raised on a farm and in a household owned by their father had lower mortality after the age of fifty than other males from rural areas. Chances for survival at older ages were not equal, however, among males whose father was a farmer. Most notably, males raised on a larger farmstead, an indicator of a higher socioeconomic status, experienced lower risk of mortality than those raised by farmers owning fewer acres. Results were widely different for females, who did not gain an advantage from being raised on a farm, wealthy or not, regardless of homeownership, but instead from having a literate father. Accounting for selection bias and shared frailty among brothers served to enhance the significance and effect size of acreage wealth and of other early life factors in the prediction of male adult mortality risk. This study provides evidence that early life effects on later life health and mortality could often be underestimated, due to a failure to account for selection and unobserved heterogeneity.

Offspring sex preference in frontier America.

Analysis of the fertility histories of women born between 1850 and 1900, as given in the Utah Population Database (UPDB), reveals the effect of the number, as well as the sex composition, of previous children on birth-stopping and birth-spacing decisions. Specifically, agricultural and Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) households­two sub-populations that might have placed different values on male and female children for economic, social, and/or cultural reasons­showed a distinct preference for male children, as expressed by birth stopping after the birth of a male child and shorter birth intervals in higher-parity births when most previous children were female. Remarkably, women in both the early "natural fertility" and the later contraceptive eras used spacing behavior to achieve a desired sex mix. Although the LDS population had relatively high fertility rates, it had the same preferences for male children as the non-LDS population did. Farmers, who presumably had a need for family labor, were more interested in the quantity than in the sex mix of their children.