• Vienna Institute of Demography (Ed.) - Miguel Sánchez-Romero - Michaela Kreyenfeld - Iñaki Permanyer - Michaela Potančoková - Vanessa di Lego (Guest Eds.)

Vienna Yearbook of Population Research 2025

Population inequality matters

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The Vienna Yearbook of Population Research is an open access journal that features contributions addressing population trends as well as a broad range of theoretical and methodological issues in population research. Besides Research articles and Review articles, the journal includes Data and Trends contributions, which analyse changes in population dynamics or present databases and data infrastructure. It also features Perspectives articles, which focus on ideas, concepts or theories, as well as invited Debates reflecting on selected questions and issues. Since 2008, the volumes have been devoted to selected themes following special calls for thematic issues.

The 2025 volume of the Vienna Yearbook of Population Research focuses on the role of population inequality in demographic research, particularly, on the interplay between population diversity and social inequality. Besides classical markers of heterogeneity in individual behavior, such as gender, age, education, family status, migration background, urban-rural residence and socio-economic status, other sources of inequality are covered in the volume. They include marginalized populations, such as homeless people, generational and spatial factors as well as emerging trends, such as digitalization. Understanding population inequality is key for modeling population developments and projecting them into the future. Equally important is to understand how and why different types of inequality arise and evolve, and what policy challenges they impose for socio-economic development, welfare systems and social cohesion.

Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften
Austrian Academy of Sciences Press
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Vienna Yearbook of Population Research 2025
ISSN 1728-4414
Print Edition
ISSN 1728-5305
Online Edition
ISBN 978-3-7001-9681-5
Print Edition
ISBN 978-3-7001-9682-2
Online Edition



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Austrian Academy of Sciences Press
A-1011 Wien, Dr. Ignaz Seipel-Platz 2,
Tel. +43-1-515 81/DW 3420, Fax +43-1-515 81/DW 3400
https://verlag.oeaw.ac.at, e-mail: bestellung.verlag@oeaw.ac.at
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Revisiting within-cohort compositional change to understand mortality inequalities

    Alyson van Raalte, Yana Vierboom, Pekka Martikainen

Vienna Yearbook of Population Research 2025, pp. 43-57, 2025/12/17

Population inequality matters

doi: 10.1553/p-7b6f-83c5


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doi:10.1553/p-7b6f-83c5

Abstract

The distribution of social characteristics changes over the life course of cohorts. These cohort compositional changes vary in magnitude across time, across populations and across socioeconomic groups. While this is evident intuitively, it is only rarely made explicit in demographic studies of mortality. In this debate piece, we argue that the classic demographic study of compositional change has become increasingly neglected in the field, as we have shifted towards causal inference of the individual-level determinants of demographic change. Using examples from the USA and Finland, we demonstrate how within-cohort compositional change operates for social characteristics such as education and divorce – a change driven by background and socially selective mortality, migration and changes in the characteristics themselves as the cohorts age. These cohort compositional changes produce non-linear age patterns of difference in the distribution of these social characteristics between Finland and the USA, and across socioeconomic groups, and may thus pose a challenge for the analyses of differential mortality. Ultimately, to understand aggregate, not individual, inequalities in mortality we need to more explicitly investigate how these covariates of mortality are changing in size and importance, and how they interact with indicators of social position over the life of the cohorts.

Keywords: Heterogeneity; Mortality selection; Social gradients; Education; Divorce

Published Online: 2025/12/17

Object Identifier: 0xc1aa5572 0x004086a2

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Metrics: https://plu.mx/plum/a/?doi=10.1553/p-7b6f-83c5

Rights: © The Author(s), Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna 2025 This article/book is published under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) that allows the sharing, use and adaptation in any medium, provided that the user gives appropriate credit, provides a link to the license, and indicates if changes were made.