Christiaan Monden
Christiaan Monden
Head of Department, Professor of Sociology and Demography, Fellow of Nuffield College
Profile
I have an eclectic/elastic interest in sociological and demographic questions around family, health & mortality, and social inequality. I am interested in how societies differ in who lives with whom, who gets how much of the good and bad stuff in life, and how (un)fortune in life is related to who your family are.
I am currently involved in the following projects:
- In FAMSIZEMATTERS, an ERC funded project of which I am the PI, we study various questions about the link between family size and (the reproduction of) social inequalities. Patrick Prag, Paula Sheppard, and Zachary van Winkle work on this project as post-doctoral researchers and Florianne Verkroost and Marianne Cunha write their DPhil within this project. Several other students are involved on data harmonization and review papers as Research Assistants.
- CritEvents - Critical Life Events and the Dynamics of Inequality - is a Norface ERA-NET funded project with partners in Amsterdam (Leopold PI), Lausanne, Florence and Stockholm. We study how the risk of and vulnerability to critical events - union dissolution and jobloss - is socially patterned, how this has changed over time, and which social policies are relevant for these associations. In Oxford I work with Lewis Anderson (Sociology) and Erzsebet Bukodi (Social Policy and Intervention) on this project.
- The Global Family Change project, spearheaded from Penn (by Luca Pesando, Hans-Peter Kohler, and Frank Furstenberg) with partners in Oxford (Nuffield), Barcelona (CED) and Milan (Boconni), explores the complex ways in which families are changing across low and middle-income countries. In 2018/19, I will be working with Liliana Andriano on spatial analysis of women’s empowerment in sub-Saharan Africa.
You might also be interested in:
European Network for the Sociological and Demographic Study of Divorce - The 11th annual conference of this group took place in Oxford.
European Consortium for Sociological Research - Melinda Mills, Janne Jonsson and I hosted the 2016 Annual Conference in Oxford.
European Sociological Review - I have been one of the Associate Editors since 2013, but I am stepping down after 5 years of service.
Research Areas: Social Inequality, Demography, Population Studies, Family Sociology, Health and Well-Being, Quantitative Methods.
Publications
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Cohort Trends in the Association Between Sibship Size and Educational Attainment in 26 Low-Fertility Countries.
June 2020|Journal article|DemographyChildren with many siblings have lower average educational attainment compared with children raised in smaller families, and this disadvantage by sibship size has been observed across many countries. We still know remarkably little, however, about how sibship size disadvantage has changed within countries and how such trends vary across countries. Using comparative data from 111 surveys from 26 low-fertility countries, we find an overall trend of growing sibship size disadvantage across cohorts in the majority of countries: between the 1931-1940 birth cohort and the 1971-1980 birth cohort, 16 of 26 countries showed a statistically significant increase in sibship size disadvantage in education, while only two countries showed a significant reduction in sibship size disadvantage. The disadvantage in years of education associated with having an additional sibling increased remarkably in post-socialist (0.3) and East Asian countries (0.34) and, to a lesser extent, Western European countries (0.2). In contrast, this disadvantage showed little change in Nordic countries (0.05) and even decreased in Anglo-Saxon countries (-0.11). We discuss explanations and implications of our comparative evidence in the context of the intergenerational transmission of education. -
The Causal Effect of Maternal Education on Child Mortality: Evidence From a Quasi-Experiment in Malawi and Uganda.
October 2019|Journal article|DemographySince the 1980s, the demographic literature has suggested that maternal schooling plays a key role in determining children's chances of survival in low- and middle-income countries; however, few studies have successfully identified a causal relationship between maternal education and under-5 mortality. To identify such a causal effect, we exploited exogenous variation in maternal education induced by schooling reforms introducing universal primary education in the second half of the 1990s in Malawi and Uganda. Using a two-stage residual inclusion approach and combining individual-level data from Demographic and Health Surveys with district-level data on the intensity of the reform, we tested whether increased maternal schooling reduced children's probability of dying before age 5. In Malawi, for each additional year of maternal education, children have a 10 % lower probability of dying; in Uganda, the odds of dying for children of women with one additional year of education are 16.6 % lower. We also explored which pathways might explain this effect of maternal education. The estimates suggest that financial barriers to medical care, attitudes toward modern health services, and rejection of domestic violence may play a role. Moreover, being more educated seems to confer enhanced proximity to a health facility and knowledge about the transmission of AIDS in Malawi, and wealth and improved personal illness control in Uganda.Humans, Child Mortality, Mothers, Socioeconomic Factors, Child, Preschool, Infant, Infant, Newborn, Uganda, Malawi, Academic Success -
Becoming a First-Time Grandparent and Subjective Well-Being: A Fixed Effects Approach
August 2019|Journal article|JOURNAL OF MARRIAGE AND FAMILYgrandchildren, grandparents, longitudinal research, retirement, well-being -
Global Family Change: Persistent Diversity with Development
March 2019|Journal article|Population and Development Review -
Psychiatric morbidity and subsequent divorce: a couple-level register-based study in Finland.
August 2018|Journal article|Social psychiatry and psychiatric epidemiologyPURPOSE:Studies that assess the role of mental health for the risk of divorce are scarce and mostly rely on individual-level data, although divorce is a couple-level phenomenon. Using data on couples, we examine the effects of both spouses' psychiatric morbidity on the risk of divorce, and whether socio-demographic factors affect these associations. METHODS:We followed 96,222 Finnish married couples for 6 years using register-based data on both spouses and their household. New incidence of psychiatric morbidity and subsequent divorce was identified from dates of prescription medication purchases and hospital admissions, and dates of registered divorce. Socio-demographic factors were measured annually for both spouses and their household. The effect of incident psychiatric morbidity on divorce risk was analyzed using Cox regression. RESULTS:Psychiatric morbidity in men increased the age-adjusted risk of divorce more than twofold and in women nearly twofold. The risk of divorce was particularly pronounced immediately after new incidence of psychiatric morbidity, before settling to a persistently high level. Psychiatric morbidity in both spouses increased the risk of divorce almost threefold. Adjustment for socio-economic factors had little effect on these associations. CONCLUSIONS:Psychiatric morbidity is a persistent risk factor of divorce. The risk is larger when both spouses experience psychiatric morbidity compared to only one spouse. The findings are consistent with the idea that poor relationship quality and dissatisfaction in couples suffering from mental health problems have long-term consequences for marital stability. Treatment of psychiatric morbidity should not focus only on the individual but on couple-level dynamics.Humans, Registries, Incidence, Risk Factors, Family Characteristics, Divorce, Spouses, Mental Disorders, Adult, Middle Aged, Finland, Female, Male -
The Additive Advantage of Having Educated Grandfathers for Children's Education: Evidence from a Cross-National Sample in Europe
August 2018|Journal article|EUROPEAN SOCIOLOGICAL REVIEW
