Jane Menken
Biographic Data
| ID | 219852 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Jane Menken |
| GIVEN NAMES | Jane |
| FAMILY NAME | Menken |
| SIGNATURE | MENKEN J |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Colorado Boulder |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-0008-0325 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 53 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 389 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 53 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1969 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 10 |
Decentralization and Equitable Service Delivery
Mortality variability and differentials by age and causes of death in rural South Africa, 1994–2018
INTRODUCTION: Understanding mortality variability by age and cause is critical to identifying intervention and prevention actions to support disadvantaged populations. We assessed mortality changes in two rural South African populations over 25 years covering pre-AIDS and peak AIDS epidemic and subsequent antiretroviral therapy (ART) availability. METHODS: Using population surveillance data from the Agincourt Health and Socio-Demographic Surveill…
U.S. Fertility in Life Course Context
Fertility is a life course process that is strongly shaped by geographic and sociodemographic subgroup contexts. In the United States, scholars face a choice: they can situate fertility in a life course perspective using panel data, which is typically representative only at the national level; or they can attend to subnational contexts using rate schedules, which do not include information on life course statuses. The method and data source we in…
Understanding Household Dynamics From the Ground Up
Investigations into household structure in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) provide important insight into how families manage domestic life in response to resource allocation and caregiving needs during periods of rapid sociopolitical and health-related challenges. Recent evidence on household structure in many LMICs contrasts with long-standing viewpoints of worldwide convergence to a Western nuclearized household model. Here, we adopt …
Twin epidemics
Our results indicate that HIV and elevated blood pressure are acting as separate, non-interacting epidemics affecting high proportions of the older adult population. PLWH with unsuppressed viral load were at higher mortality risk compared to those uninfected. Systolic blood pressure was a mortality risk factor independent of HIV status. As antiretroviral therapy becomes more widespread, further longitudinal follow-up is needed to understand how t…
Organizations matter in local governance
Health systems strengthening is at the forefront of the global health agenda. Many health systems in low-resource settings face profound challenges, and robust causal evidence on the effects of health systems reforms is lacking. Decentralization has been one of the most prominent reforms, and after more than 50 years of implementation and hundreds of studies, we still know little about whether these policies improve, harm or are inconsequential f…
Clusters of HIV Risk and Protective Sexual Behaviors in Agincourt, Rural South Africa
Sexual behavior and HIV risk across the life course in rural South Africa
There is limited information about sexual behavior among older Africans, which is problematic given high HIV rates among older adults. We use a population-based survey among people aged 15-80+ to examine the prevalence of sexual risk and protective behaviors in the context of a severe HIV epidemic. We focus on variation across the life course, gender and HIV serostatus to compare the similarities and differences of young, middle aged, and older a…
On Becoming a Mathematical Demographer-And the Career in Problem-Focused Inquiry that Followed
I greatly appreciate this opportunity to reflect on my career. Looking back over five decades of involvement in demographic and sociological scholarship, I have tried to say a bit about my personal life and my work-from developing mathematical models of fertility early on, to applying lessons from those models to empirical work in the United States, Bangladesh, and elsewhere in the developing world, to involvement in evaluations of health and pop…
Premarital Births and Union Formation in Rural South Africa
CONTEXT: In rural South Africa, women often delay union formation until they are in their late 20s, though premarital first births are common. METHODS: Longitudinal data from the Agincourt Health and Socio-Demographic Surveillance System in rural South Africa were used to examine the relationship between premarital birth and union entry among 55,158 nonmigrant women aged 10-35 who took part in at least one annual census from 1993 to 2012. Discret…
Let's Talk about Sex, Maybe
Researchers are often skeptical of sexual behavior surveys: Respondents may lie or forget details of their intimate lives, and interviewers may exercise authority in how they capture responses. We use data from a 2010-2011 cross-sectional sexual behavior survey in rural South Africa to explore who says what to whom about their sexual lives. Results show an effect of fieldworker age across outcomes: Respondents report "safer," more "responsible" s…
Who Benefits—Or Does not—From South Africa’s Old Age Pension? Evidence from Characteristics of Rural Pensioners and Non-Pensioners
Social protection grants play a critical role in survival and livelihoods of elderly individuals in South Africa. Rarely is it possible to assess how well a social program reaches its target population. Using a 2010 survey and Agincourt Health Demographic Surveillance System census data we conduct multivariate logistic regression to predict pension receipt in rural South Africa. We find only 80% of age-eligible individuals report pension receipt.…
Cardiometabolic disease risk and HIV status in rural South Africa
Sub-Saharan Africa is facing intersecting epidemics of HIV and hypertension. In this setting, around half the adult population require long-term care for at least one of HIV, hypertension or diabetes. Together with the adverse effects that HIV and its treatment have on lipids, this may have serious implications for the South African health care system. Monitoring of the interaction of HIV, ART use, and cardiometabolic disease is needed at both in…
Prevalence of HIV among those 15 and older in rural South Africa
A greater knowledge of the burden of HIV in rural areas of Southern Africa is needed, especially among older adults. We conducted a cross-sectional biomarker survey in the rural South African Agincourt Health and Socio-demographic Surveillance site in 2010-2011 and estimated HIV prevalence and risk factors. Using an age-sex stratified random sample of ages 15+, a total of 5037 (65.7%) of a possible 7662 individuals were located and 4362 (86.6%) c…
The impact of pensions on health and wellbeing in rural South Africa
Improving public health training and research capacity in Africa
BACKGROUND: Research training for public health professionals is key to the future of public health and policy in Africa. A growing number of schools of public health are connected to health and socio-demographic surveillance system field sites in developing countries, in Africa and Asia in particular. Linking training programs with these sites provides important opportunities to improve training, build local research capacity, foreground local h…
Ageing and adult health status in eight lower-income countries
BACKGROUND: Globally, ageing impacts all countries, with a majority of older persons residing in lower- and middle-income countries now and into the future. An understanding of the health and well-being of these ageing populations is important for policy and planning; however, research on ageing and adult health that informs policy predominantly comes from higher-income countries. A collaboration between the WHO Study on global AGEing and adult h…
Differential Treatment of Children by Sex
In nearly all populations, in the absence of special circumstances, the numbers of males and females are approximately equal; female advantage in life expectancy balances the slightly higher birth rate of boys. Cultural practices such as infanticide, differential feeding, and provision of health care by sex have, in some populations in the past, led to an unequal ratio of boys to girls and higher mortality and morbidity for girls compared to boys…
The impact of family members on the self-reported health of older men and women in a rural area of Bangladesh
The purpose of this study is to examine whether the co-residence of spouses and children affects self-reported general health among older men and women in a rural area of Bangladesh. Binary logistic regression has been used to explore the impact of spouses and children on self-reported health, with particular attention to the gender of children and interactions with chronic disease. The data are from the Matlab Health and Socio-Economic Survey . …
Childbearing and Women's Survival
Effects of childbearing on women's mortality and the implications of family planning programs in reducing these effects are examined in a 20-year prospective study of more than 2,000 women in Matlab, Bangladesh. Maternal mortality is defined as a death occurring in the six weeks after childbirth. But childbearing may affect women's survival beyond this brief period. Additional hypotheses considered relate to 1) cumulative exposure to childbearing…
Adverse Effects of Next Birth, Gender, and Family Composition on Child Survival in Rural Bangladesh
This study examines mortality risks among children aged 1-4 years in Bangladesh. Data were obtained from the 1982 Matlab Census and Demographic Surveillance System on 12266 singleton births that occurred in Matlab between January 1981 and December 1982. Findings indicate that the proportion of 4-year-olds at birth-to-conception intervals (BCI) at ages 13-24 months was 0.228. Mortality rates varied by the sex of the child area and length of the BC…
Modèles démographiques
Menken Jane, Coale Ansley Johnson, Heuveline Patrick. Modèles démographiques : les cinquante premières années de Population. In: Population, 50e année, n°6, 1995. Cinquante années de Population pp. 1545-1564
Modèles démographiques
La première table de mortalité, celle de Halley, supposait la population de Breslau stationnaire ; la démographie recourt donc aux modèles depuis ses débuts. Louis Henry définissait ceux-ci « comme l'étude de relations numériques en vue de déceler les causes, de s'y retrouver dans la complexité d'un ensemble de données non indépendantes, de justifier des méthodes de mesures ou des procédés de corrections d'erreurs... Ils remplacent dans bien des …
Older widow mortality in rural Bangladesh
Individual-level sterility
This paper extends work on measures of population proportions sterile to propose a new estimator of an individual woman’s age at sterility and consequently her sterility status at given ages. Accuracy and reliability, examined in a simulation study, appear satisfactory. From World Fertility Survey data for five African countries, the proportions sterile by age estimated by the individual measure and by the population estimator are almost identica…
Demographic Foundations of Family Change
As a result of the decline in mortality current cohorts have the theoretical potential to spend more time in the conjugal family statuses of parent child and spouse. To determine the extent to which this potential has been realized in the US a model was developed to simulate demographic conditions in 1800 1900 1960 and 1980 and then calculate how long women remained in the various family statuses in each historical period. Despite declines in fer…
Proportional Hazards Life Table Models
The proportional hazards life table is a recently developed approach to the analysis of survival data when mortality risks vary among individuals. It assumes that at a given age (or duration since the start of a life) the force of mortality is a constant (specific to that age) multiplied by a proportionality factor which is determined by the characteristics of the individual and does not change unless these covariates do. In this paper, the metho…
The Nutrition Fertility Link
The determinants of age-specific marital fertility rates in non-contracepting populations are discussed and the physiological link between nutrition and reproduction in women who are chronically malnourished rather than famished are examined. Initial attention is directed to menarche and menopause for these set the outer bounds to the time of childbearing. This is followed by a discussion of the determinants of birth interval. Birth interval and …
Famines in Historical Perspective
This paper presents a challenge to the Malthusian view that historically famines have been a consequence of overpopulation relative to available resources. The Malthusian paradigm has been used to explain periods of population stability in the past and to account for modern population growth once subsistence crises were no longer a threat. Using premodern Asian populations as a model the sequence of demographic changes that could be expected to h…
Age and fertility
Today I would like to talk about two demographic issues, both of which may have far-reaching effects in the United States and neither of which is well-understood. The first of these is infertility, which has received extensive but often ill-considered attention in the press and other forms of popular media. The second issue is related, although the connections are not immediately apparent. This issue is the changing size of successive generations…
The impact of pensions on health and wellbeing in rural South Africa
Seasonal migration and seasonal variation in fecundability
Seasonal patterns in conception rates have been documented in several recent studies. In this paper, a mathematical model of the reproductive process is developed through which the impact of such variation in conception rates is assessed. It is found that the effect on fertility can be quite substantial, but that the birth rate when seasonal variation is occurring is approximated well by the birth rate calculated when conception rates are constan…
Measuring sterility from incomplete birth histories
In this article, methods are presented for measuring the level and age pattern of sterility from incomplete birth histories, such as those that can be collected in demographic surveys of women who may not yet have reached the end of their reproductive span. The characteristics of the methods are examined in a simulation study that demonstrates that estimates based on information about fertility subsequent to a given age are more robust to variati…
Older widow mortality in rural Bangladesh
The Effects of Breastfeeding and Nutrition on Fecundability in Rural Bangladesh
Data taken from the ‘Determinants of Natural Fertility’ study, Bangladesh, are used with multivariate hazard models to study variations in fecundability between women, especially the relationship between nutritional status, breastfeeding practices, and the monthly probability of conceiving. It is found that fecundability varies both between women of a given age and, for a particular woman, by age. The variation is related to four variables: separ…
Let's Talk about Sex, Maybe
Researchers are often skeptical of sexual behavior surveys: Respondents may lie or forget details of their intimate lives, and interviewers may exercise authority in how they capture responses. We use data from a 2010-2011 cross-sectional sexual behavior survey in rural South Africa to explore who says what to whom about their sexual lives. Results show an effect of fieldworker age across outcomes: Respondents report "safer," more "responsible" s…
Estimating the Distribution of Interval Length
In response to recent questions about the relative merits of sampling from different groups of births when studying the birth interval and its components, we derive analytically the implications of sampling births according to several different schemes and of estimating the distribution of waiting times from both current status and retrospective history measures. Breastfeeding is used as an example to illustrate that the distributions of weaning …
Childbearing and Women's Survival
Effects of childbearing on women's mortality and the implications of family planning programs in reducing these effects are examined in a 20-year prospective study of more than 2,000 women in Matlab, Bangladesh. Maternal mortality is defined as a death occurring in the six weeks after childbirth. But childbearing may affect women's survival beyond this brief period. Additional hypotheses considered relate to 1) cumulative exposure to childbearing…
The impact of family members on the self-reported health of older men and women in a rural area of Bangladesh
The purpose of this study is to examine whether the co-residence of spouses and children affects self-reported general health among older men and women in a rural area of Bangladesh. Binary logistic regression has been used to explore the impact of spouses and children on self-reported health, with particular attention to the gender of children and interactions with chronic disease. The data are from the Matlab Health and Socio-Economic Survey . …
Individual-level sterility
This paper extends work on measures of population proportions sterile to propose a new estimator of an individual woman’s age at sterility and consequently her sterility status at given ages. Accuracy and reliability, examined in a simulation study, appear satisfactory. From World Fertility Survey data for five African countries, the proportions sterile by age estimated by the individual measure and by the population estimator are almost identica…
Adverse Effects of Next Birth, Gender, and Family Composition on Child Survival in Rural Bangladesh
This study examines mortality risks among children aged 1-4 years in Bangladesh. Data were obtained from the 1982 Matlab Census and Demographic Surveillance System on 12266 singleton births that occurred in Matlab between January 1981 and December 1982. Findings indicate that the proportion of 4-year-olds at birth-to-conception intervals (BCI) at ages 13-24 months was 0.228. Mortality rates varied by the sex of the child area and length of the BC…
Birth-interval dynamics in rural Bangladesh and maternal weight
This article reports on the results of a study conducted in rural Bangladesh on the influence of maternal weight on the components of birth intervals, including gestation and intrauterine mortality, the duration of postpartum amenorrhea, and the duration of waiting time to conception (the menstrual interval). When biological factors (in-cluding maternal age, parity, and supplementation practices) and behavioral variables, including religion, educ…
Organizations matter in local governance
Health systems strengthening is at the forefront of the global health agenda. Many health systems in low-resource settings face profound challenges, and robust causal evidence on the effects of health systems reforms is lacking. Decentralization has been one of the most prominent reforms, and after more than 50 years of implementation and hundreds of studies, we still know little about whether these policies improve, harm or are inconsequential f…
On the apparent subfecundity of non‐family planners
Contraceptive Use During Lactation in Developing Countries
Contraceptive use by breastfeeding women in developing countries has led to concern about potentially harmful effects of steroid contraceptives on the health of breastfed children. In this paper, breastfeeding women's use of the pill and hormonal injections is investigated using survey data from 17 Latin American, Asian, and African countries. The results indicate that while the proportions of breastfeeding women who use these methods were small …
Biometric Models of Fertility
Biometrics models describe aspects of fertility in terms of mathematical functions. A number of purposes are served by these models: description and estimation, prediction, and evaluation of the effects of changes in the parameters governing the specified relationships. This paper, by reviewing reproductive models of varying complexity, attempts to illustrate their many uses in fertility research
Population Change in a Rural Area of Bangladesh, 1967-87
The Matlab subdistrict of Bangladesh is unique in the developing world in the extent of demographic data available over a long time period, during which a serious famine occurred and a family planning program that employed village women as home visitors was introduced within the context of maternal and child health services. These data demonstrate that fertility in this population is well below the maximum biologically feasible, primarily due to …
Estimating Levels, Trends, and Determinants of Child Mortality in Countries with Poor Statistics
James Trussell, Jane Menken, Estimating Levels, Trends, and Determinants of Child Mortality in Countries with Poor Statistics, Population and Development Review, Vol. 10, Supplement: Child Survival: Strategies for Research (1984), pp. 325-346
On Becoming a Mathematical Demographer-And the Career in Problem-Focused Inquiry that Followed
I greatly appreciate this opportunity to reflect on my career. Looking back over five decades of involvement in demographic and sociological scholarship, I have tried to say a bit about my personal life and my work-from developing mathematical models of fertility early on, to applying lessons from those models to empirical work in the United States, Bangladesh, and elsewhere in the developing world, to involvement in evaluations of health and pop…
Biological determinants of demographic processes
Biological determinants of demographic processes. J MenkenCopyRight https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.64.7.657 Published Online: October 07, 2011
Probability models for family building
Considerable literature now exists on stochastic models for the reproductive history of a cohort of couples. These models are of varying complexity and the relationships between separate treatments are not always clear. A classification system for such models is proposed, followed by a historical review of models for family building and for logically related processes. Models, differing only in treatment of time as discrete or continuous, are pre…
On the apparent subfecundity of non‐family planners
On relationships between longitudinal characteristics and cross-sectional data
On relationships between longitudinal characteristics and cross-sectional data. Affiliation J A Menken, and M C ShepsCopyRight https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.60.8.1506 Published Online: August 29, 2011
Biological determinants of demographic processes
Biological determinants of demographic processes. J MenkenCopyRight https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.64.7.657 Published Online: October 07, 2011
Mathematical Models of Conception and Birth
Biometric Models of Fertility
Biometrics models describe aspects of fertility in terms of mathematical functions. A number of purposes are served by these models: description and estimation, prediction, and evaluation of the effects of changes in the parameters governing the specified relationships. This paper, by reviewing reproductive models of varying complexity, attempts to illustrate their many uses in fertility research
The mortimer Spiegelman Gold Medal Award
The Mortimer Spiegelman gold medal award
Seasonal migration and seasonal variation in fecundability
Seasonal patterns in conception rates have been documented in several recent studies. In this paper, a mathematical model of the reproductive process is developed through which the impact of such variation in conception rates is assessed. It is found that the effect on fertility can be quite substantial, but that the birth rate when seasonal variation is occurring is approximated well by the birth rate calculated when conception rates are constan…
Proportional Hazards Life Table Models
The proportional hazards life table is a recently developed approach to the analysis of survival data when mortality risks vary among individuals. It assumes that at a given age (or duration since the start of a life) the force of mortality is a constant (specific to that age) multiplied by a proportionality factor which is determined by the characteristics of the individual and does not change unless these covariates do. In this paper, the metho…
The Nutrition Fertility Link
The determinants of age-specific marital fertility rates in non-contracepting populations are discussed and the physiological link between nutrition and reproduction in women who are chronically malnourished rather than famished are examined. Initial attention is directed to menarche and menopause for these set the outer bounds to the time of childbearing. This is followed by a discussion of the determinants of birth interval. Birth interval and …
Age, Period, and Cohort Effects in Demography
Estimating Levels, Trends, and Determinants of Child Mortality in Countries with Poor Statistics
James Trussell, Jane Menken, Estimating Levels, Trends, and Determinants of Child Mortality in Countries with Poor Statistics, Population and Development Review, Vol. 10, Supplement: Child Survival: Strategies for Research (1984), pp. 325-346
Age and fertility
Today I would like to talk about two demographic issues, both of which may have far-reaching effects in the United States and neither of which is well-understood. The first of these is infertility, which has received extensive but often ill-considered attention in the press and other forms of popular media. The second issue is related, although the connections are not immediately apparent. This issue is the changing size of successive generations…
Contraceptive Use During Lactation in Developing Countries
Contraceptive use by breastfeeding women in developing countries has led to concern about potentially harmful effects of steroid contraceptives on the health of breastfed children. In this paper, breastfeeding women's use of the pill and hormonal injections is investigated using survey data from 17 Latin American, Asian, and African countries. The results indicate that while the proportions of breastfeeding women who use these methods were small …
Famines in Historical Perspective
This paper presents a challenge to the Malthusian view that historically famines have been a consequence of overpopulation relative to available resources. The Malthusian paradigm has been used to explain periods of population stability in the past and to account for modern population growth once subsistence crises were no longer a threat. Using premodern Asian populations as a model the sequence of demographic changes that could be expected to h…
Female reproductive development
In this paper we applied a recently developed statistical technique, hazard modelling, to the study of menarche and adolescent subfecundity. Using data collected in Bangladesh in 1976 and 1977, which included anthropometric and socioeconomic status measures, we found that age and weight were significant predictors of menarche; no other measure of growth significantly added explanatory power. Weight was at least as good as other more complex measu…
Proximate determinants of fertility and mortality
World Population and U.S. Policy
World Population and U.S. Policy
Age and infertility
Direct evidence on age patterns of infecundity and sterility cannot be obtained from contemporary populations because such large fractions of couples use contraception or have been sterilized. Instead, historical data are exploited to yield upper bounds applicable to contemporary populations on the proportions sterile at each age. Examination of recent changes in sexual behavior that may increase infecundity indicates that sexually transmitted in…
Demographic Foundations of Family Change
As a result of the decline in mortality current cohorts have the theoretical potential to spend more time in the conjugal family statuses of parent child and spouse. To determine the extent to which this potential has been realized in the US a model was developed to simulate demographic conditions in 1800 1900 1960 and 1980 and then calculate how long women remained in the various family statuses in each historical period. Despite declines in fer…
The Effects of Breastfeeding and Nutrition on Fecundability in Rural Bangladesh
Data taken from the ‘Determinants of Natural Fertility’ study, Bangladesh, are used with multivariate hazard models to study variations in fecundability between women, especially the relationship between nutritional status, breastfeeding practices, and the monthly probability of conceiving. It is found that fecundability varies both between women of a given age and, for a particular woman, by age. The variation is related to four variables: separ…
On the Role of Crises in Historical Perspective
Estimating the Distribution of Interval Length
In response to recent questions about the relative merits of sampling from different groups of births when studying the birth interval and its components, we derive analytically the implications of sampling births according to several different schemes and of estimating the distribution of waiting times from both current status and retrospective history measures. Breastfeeding is used as an example to illustrate that the distributions of weaning …
Demography (34 works) · Population (33 works) · Medicine (29 works) · Sociology (27 works) · Economics (18 works) · Demography (17 works) · Global Maternal and Child Health (17 works) · Environmental health (16 works) · Fertility (16 works) · Geography (14 works)