Alexander Weinreb
Biographic Data
| ID | 215185 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Alexander Weinreb |
| GIVEN NAMES | Alexander |
| FAMILY NAME | Weinreb |
| SIGNATURE | WEINREB A |
| AFFILIATIONS | The University of Texas at Austin |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2441-4040 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 33 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 152 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 33 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2001 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
Socioeconomic inequality in fertility responses to universal preschool reform
This study examines how a national reform introducing universal free preschool education affected fertility behavior in Israel, a high-income country with persistently high fertility rates. The 2012 reform expanded public funding to cover preschool costs for all children aged three and four, eliminating tuition fees for both public and licensed private providers during core hours. Using longitudinal administrative birth records covering approxima…
The Age of Anorexia and the Weight of the Holocaust
This essay analyzes the rise of anorexia nervosa during the 1980s, a decade sometimes called the Age of Anorexia, by focusing on a metaphor that became widespread at the time: the anorexic girl as concentration camp inmate. The article traces the metaphor to its origins in postwar medical research, mostly carried out by Jewish doctors working in the aftermath of the Holocaust, on the long-term psychological and physiological impacts of extreme hu…
Emily K. Abel. Sick and Tired
Just months into the current COVID-19 pandemic, reports began to emerge about what came to be termed long COVID, a cluster of symptoms that lingered (or emerged) months after acute infection, ranging from fever, chills, and aches and pains, to vision problems, brain fog, and chronic exhaustion. Patients complaining about these symptoms, disproportionately women, were dismissed, told to rest or “take it easy,” or advised to see a therapist to trea…
The Law of Blood
The Law of Blood: Thinking and Acting as a NaziJohann Chapoutot Johann Chapoutot, The Law of Blood: Thinking and Acting as a Nazi (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2018), 512 pp., hardcover $35.00, electronic version available. Alice Weinreb Alice Weinreb Loyola University Chicago Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Volume 34, Issue 2, Fall 2020, Pages 3…
Effects of changes in rainfall and temperature on age- and sex-specific patterns of rural-urban migration in sub-Saharan Africa
We evaluate how changes in weather patterns affected rural-urban migration across 41 sub-Saharan African countries, by age and sex, over the 1980–2015 period. We combine recent age- and sex-specific estimates of net rural-urban migration with historical data on rainfall and temperature from the Climate Research Unit (CRU). We also compare standard unweighted estimates of rainfall and temperature to estimates weighted by the proportion of the coun…
World War I and the Origins of the Modern Food System
This forum explores how the demands of World War I shaped industrial food production, state control over distribution, and cultures of food consumption. As the belligerent nations strained to mobilize their full resources, the production of food was arguably as important as munitions, and indeed the two were linked, since the Haber-Bosch process for synthesizing ammonia, invented shortly before the outbreak of the war, was used to make both gunpo…
Strangers in the Field
Evaluating a long-term methodological norm - the use of interviewers who have no prior social relationship to respondents - we compare response patterns across levels of interviewer-respondent familiarity. We differentiate three distinct levels of interviewer-respondent familiarity, based on whether the interviewer is directly acquainted with the respondent or their family, acquainted with the research setting, or is a complete outsider. We also …
Gewalt, Zurichtung, Befreiung? Individuelle ‘Ausnahmezustände’ in 20. Jahrhundert
At least since 11 September 2001, politicians, military leaders and social critics have increasingly asserted that we are living in a ‘state of exception’ or ‘state of emergency’. In response, the concept has come under scrutiny from scholars across the disciplines. Much of the academic literature on states of exception has been either theoretical or has focused on top-down analyses of states and their expressions of collective power. This anthol…
Modern Hungers
This book explores Germany’s role in the two world wars and the Cold War to analyze the food economy of the twentieth century. It argues that controlling food supply and determining how and what people ate shaped the course of these three wars. Because Germany played a central role in these conflicts, the political and economic ambitions of its changing governments had international ramifications. At the same time, focusing on changing methods of…
Poverty and Welfare in Modern German History
When I first moved to Berlin in 1999, debates over the country’s welfare system were ubiquitous. The spread of poverty throughout the former GDR, especially among East German women who suffered disproportionately from the dismantling of East Germany’s social support system and who found it near-impossible to find full-time employment, famously made them the ‘losers of reunification’, and prompted both East and West Germans to question the economi…
Land cover change and fertility in West-Central Africa
Own-Choice Marriage and Fertility in Turkey
Goode's foundational work on the fertility transition identified own-choice marriage as a factor driving fertility decline, part of a widening repertoire of choice pertaining to marriage and childbearing. Yet research supporting this connection in today's transitional societies is scarce and somewhat contradictory, and it is unclear how other marital traditions, such as consanguineous marriage, shape this relationship. This study evaluates Goode'…
A test of the stranger-interviewer norm in the Dominican Republic
We offer the first empirical test of the 'stranger-interviewer norm', according to which interviewers in social, demographic, and health surveys should be strangers-not personally familiar with respondents. We use data from an experimental survey in the Dominican Republic that featured three types of interviewer: from out of town (outsiders); local but unknown to the respondent (local-strangers); and local with a previous relationship to the resp…
The exclusion from welfare benefits
Aids and Social Networks
During the past 30 years, research on the global AIDS pandemic and on social networks has coevolved. Insights from social networks literature have advanced our understandings of AIDS; simultaneously, key empirical insights from the AIDS literature have furthered the development of social network research—especially methodologically. We elaborate on this reciprocal relationship, identifying some of the key developments and future directions for re…
The Greenest Nation? A New History of German Environmentalism
Frank Uekötter’s most recent book fills an important gap in environmental history as well as in German history. An admirably concise survey of environmental thinking and policy in Germany over the entire twentieth century–stretching into the twenty-first—this book will prove useful for courses on environmental history looking for case studies outside the United States, as well as for modern German surveys looking for incorporate environmental his…
Military westernization and state repression in the post-Cold War era
Undercounting Urban Residents in Bolivia
Heterophily in rural Malawi
A rich layer of empirical research detailing the effects of social networks on attitudes and behavior has accumulated in demography over the last 20 years. But there is limited data on social interaction in general, and odd inconsistencies between network
Religion and Interest in Politics in Sub-Saharan Africa
Since the 1980s, sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) has experienced a major wave of democratization, and concurrent expansions of independent Christianity and Reformist Islam. Scholarly narratives about the relationship between religion and politics have alternated between emphasizing religion's inclusive and divisive political potential. Using data from thirteen countries, we evaluate competing hypotheses arising from these narratives. Focusing on the gra…
Religion and Aids in Africa
This book provides an empirical account of how religion affects the interpretation, prevention, and mitigation of AIDS in the world's most religious continent. Drawing upon their extensive fieldwork in Malawi and survey data from 26 other countries in sub-Saharan Africa, the book identifies religious patterns in HIV prevalence, shows how religion shapes interpretations and understandings of AIDS, examine religious differences in risk and preventi…
For the Hungry Have No Past nor Do They Belong to a Political Party
When World War II finally came to an end, the Allied forces were primed to face a world of hunger. Since the earliest days of the conflict, experts throughout Europe and Asia had been predicting that the unfathomable scale of the war would result in a massive and permanent restructuring of the global food economy. Military victory itself was cast as inextricably intertwined with control over foodstuffs. In 1940, the British nutritionist and futur…
The Effects of Questionnaire Translation on Demographic Data and Analysis
Social inequality and HIV-testing
The plan to increase HIV testing is a cornerstone of the international health strategy against the HIV/AIDS epidemic, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa. This paper highlights a problematic aspect of that plan: the reliance on clinic-rather than homebased testing. First, drawing on DHS data from across Africa, we demonstrate the substantial differences in socio-demographic and economic profiles between those who report having ever had an HIV test…
Characteristics of Women in Consanguineous Marriages in Egypt, 1988–2000
The Limitations of Stranger-Interviewers in Rural Kenya
Virtually all survey data are collected by "strangers," that is, individuals with no prior social relationship with respondents. Although it has long been recognized that attitudes toward strangers vary cross-culturally, there has been no systematic discussion of how this variation might affect survey data. This article attempts such a discussion, using data from a longitudinal research study in rural Kenya. It reviews qualitative impressions of …
An Assessment of the KDICP and MDICP Data Quality
This paper evaluates the quality of the data collected as part of the Kenya and Malawi Diffusion and Ideational Change Projects, two longitudinal household surveys that examine the role of social networks in influencing attitudes and behavior regarding
Lateral and vertical intergenerational exchange in rural Malawi
First Politics, Then Culture
Ethnic differences in demographic behavior tend to be disguised behind analytically opaque labels like "district" or "region," or else subjected to simplistic cultural explanations. Drawing on new political economy, sociological theory and the political science literature on sub-Saharan Africa, this article proposes an alternative explanatory model and tests it empirically with reference to Kenya. Access to political power and, through power, acc…
A test of the stranger-interviewer norm in the Dominican Republic
We offer the first empirical test of the 'stranger-interviewer norm', according to which interviewers in social, demographic, and health surveys should be strangers-not personally familiar with respondents. We use data from an experimental survey in the Dominican Republic that featured three types of interviewer: from out of town (outsiders); local but unknown to the respondent (local-strangers); and local with a previous relationship to the resp…
Characteristics of Women in Consanguineous Marriages in Egypt, 1988–2000
Effects of changes in rainfall and temperature on age- and sex-specific patterns of rural-urban migration in sub-Saharan Africa
We evaluate how changes in weather patterns affected rural-urban migration across 41 sub-Saharan African countries, by age and sex, over the 1980–2015 period. We combine recent age- and sex-specific estimates of net rural-urban migration with historical data on rainfall and temperature from the Climate Research Unit (CRU). We also compare standard unweighted estimates of rainfall and temperature to estimates weighted by the proportion of the coun…
Land cover change and fertility in West-Central Africa
Strangers in the Field
Evaluating a long-term methodological norm - the use of interviewers who have no prior social relationship to respondents - we compare response patterns across levels of interviewer-respondent familiarity. We differentiate three distinct levels of interviewer-respondent familiarity, based on whether the interviewer is directly acquainted with the respondent or their family, acquainted with the research setting, or is a complete outsider. We also …
Hotspots and Coldspots
We explore the characteristics of households and villages in which orphans are resident in two areas of Malawi. We first review pertinent themes in qualitative data collected in our research sites. Then, using spatial analysis, we show how positive and negative clusters of orphans - which we term orphanhood "hotspots" and "coldspots" - can be found at the village and sub-village levels. In the third and longest section of the paper, and using mul…
For the Hungry Have No Past nor Do They Belong to a Political Party
When World War II finally came to an end, the Allied forces were primed to face a world of hunger. Since the earliest days of the conflict, experts throughout Europe and Asia had been predicting that the unfathomable scale of the war would result in a massive and permanent restructuring of the global food economy. Military victory itself was cast as inextricably intertwined with control over foodstuffs. In 1940, the British nutritionist and futur…
Change and instability
This article examines changes in network structure using data on conversational networks from the 1998 and 2001 rounds of the Malawi Diffusion and Ideation Change project. The principal aims are to show that network structure can change significantly
The Effects of Questionnaire Translation on Demographic Data and Analysis
Insiders, Outsiders, and the Editing of Inconsistent Survey Data
Data editing, a crucial task in the data production process, has received little scientific attention. Consequently, there is no consensus among social scientists about how data should be edited or by whom. While some argue that it should be left to data managers and data users, others claim that it is primarily a task for fieldworkers. The authors review these divergent approaches to editing and evaluate the underlying theoretical arguments. Res…
World War I and the Origins of the Modern Food System
This forum explores how the demands of World War I shaped industrial food production, state control over distribution, and cultures of food consumption. As the belligerent nations strained to mobilize their full resources, the production of food was arguably as important as munitions, and indeed the two were linked, since the Haber-Bosch process for synthesizing ammonia, invented shortly before the outbreak of the war, was used to make both gunpo…
Own-Choice Marriage and Fertility in Turkey
Goode's foundational work on the fertility transition identified own-choice marriage as a factor driving fertility decline, part of a widening repertoire of choice pertaining to marriage and childbearing. Yet research supporting this connection in today's transitional societies is scarce and somewhat contradictory, and it is unclear how other marital traditions, such as consanguineous marriage, shape this relationship. This study evaluates Goode'…
The exclusion from welfare benefits
Social inequality and HIV-testing
The plan to increase HIV testing is a cornerstone of the international health strategy against the HIV/AIDS epidemic, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa. This paper highlights a problematic aspect of that plan: the reliance on clinic-rather than homebased testing. First, drawing on DHS data from across Africa, we demonstrate the substantial differences in socio-demographic and economic profiles between those who report having ever had an HIV test…
First Politics, Then Culture
Ethnic differences in demographic behavior tend to be disguised behind analytically opaque labels like "district" or "region," or else subjected to simplistic cultural explanations. Drawing on new political economy, sociological theory and the political science literature on sub-Saharan Africa, this article proposes an alternative explanatory model and tests it empirically with reference to Kenya. Access to political power and, through power, acc…
Lateral and vertical intergenerational exchange in rural Malawi
An Assessment of the KDICP and MDICP Data Quality
This paper evaluates the quality of the data collected as part of the Kenya and Malawi Diffusion and Ideational Change Projects, two longitudinal household surveys that examine the role of social networks in influencing attitudes and behavior regarding
Change and instability
This article examines changes in network structure using data on conversational networks from the 1998 and 2001 rounds of the Malawi Diffusion and Ideation Change project. The principal aims are to show that network structure can change significantly
The Limitations of Stranger-Interviewers in Rural Kenya
Virtually all survey data are collected by "strangers," that is, individuals with no prior social relationship with respondents. Although it has long been recognized that attitudes toward strangers vary cross-culturally, there has been no systematic discussion of how this variation might affect survey data. This article attempts such a discussion, using data from a longitudinal research study in rural Kenya. It reviews qualitative impressions of …
Characteristics of Women in Consanguineous Marriages in Egypt, 1988–2000
Hotspots and Coldspots
We explore the characteristics of households and villages in which orphans are resident in two areas of Malawi. We first review pertinent themes in qualitative data collected in our research sites. Then, using spatial analysis, we show how positive and negative clusters of orphans - which we term orphanhood "hotspots" and "coldspots" - can be found at the village and sub-village levels. In the third and longest section of the paper, and using mul…
Hottentot b-b-blues
In this short article I describe the experience of being a stuttering academic, drawing on what I jokingly describe as my longue-durée, multi-sited ethnography of stuttering - that is, my personal identity and experiences as an exotic stutterer moving through space and time. The article plays with the nominal equivalence between Hottentots as the group that long serviced Europeans and their imagined Africa and Hottentots as stutterers ( hotteren-…
Insiders, Outsiders, and the Editing of Inconsistent Survey Data
Data editing, a crucial task in the data production process, has received little scientific attention. Consequently, there is no consensus among social scientists about how data should be edited or by whom. While some argue that it should be left to data managers and data users, others claim that it is primarily a task for fieldworkers. The authors review these divergent approaches to editing and evaluate the underlying theoretical arguments. Res…
The Effects of Questionnaire Translation on Demographic Data and Analysis
Social inequality and HIV-testing
The plan to increase HIV testing is a cornerstone of the international health strategy against the HIV/AIDS epidemic, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa. This paper highlights a problematic aspect of that plan: the reliance on clinic-rather than homebased testing. First, drawing on DHS data from across Africa, we demonstrate the substantial differences in socio-demographic and economic profiles between those who report having ever had an HIV test…
Religion and Aids in Africa
This book provides an empirical account of how religion affects the interpretation, prevention, and mitigation of AIDS in the world's most religious continent. Drawing upon their extensive fieldwork in Malawi and survey data from 26 other countries in sub-Saharan Africa, the book identifies religious patterns in HIV prevalence, shows how religion shapes interpretations and understandings of AIDS, examine religious differences in risk and preventi…
For the Hungry Have No Past nor Do They Belong to a Political Party
When World War II finally came to an end, the Allied forces were primed to face a world of hunger. Since the earliest days of the conflict, experts throughout Europe and Asia had been predicting that the unfathomable scale of the war would result in a massive and permanent restructuring of the global food economy. Military victory itself was cast as inextricably intertwined with control over foodstuffs. In 1940, the British nutritionist and futur…
Religion and Interest in Politics in Sub-Saharan Africa
Since the 1980s, sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) has experienced a major wave of democratization, and concurrent expansions of independent Christianity and Reformist Islam. Scholarly narratives about the relationship between religion and politics have alternated between emphasizing religion's inclusive and divisive political potential. Using data from thirteen countries, we evaluate competing hypotheses arising from these narratives. Focusing on the gra…
Undercounting Urban Residents in Bolivia
Heterophily in rural Malawi
A rich layer of empirical research detailing the effects of social networks on attitudes and behavior has accumulated in demography over the last 20 years. But there is limited data on social interaction in general, and odd inconsistencies between network
Aids and Social Networks
During the past 30 years, research on the global AIDS pandemic and on social networks has coevolved. Insights from social networks literature have advanced our understandings of AIDS; simultaneously, key empirical insights from the AIDS literature have furthered the development of social network research—especially methodologically. We elaborate on this reciprocal relationship, identifying some of the key developments and future directions for re…
The Greenest Nation? A New History of German Environmentalism
Frank Uekötter’s most recent book fills an important gap in environmental history as well as in German history. An admirably concise survey of environmental thinking and policy in Germany over the entire twentieth century–stretching into the twenty-first—this book will prove useful for courses on environmental history looking for case studies outside the United States, as well as for modern German surveys looking for incorporate environmental his…
Military westernization and state repression in the post-Cold War era
A test of the stranger-interviewer norm in the Dominican Republic
We offer the first empirical test of the 'stranger-interviewer norm', according to which interviewers in social, demographic, and health surveys should be strangers-not personally familiar with respondents. We use data from an experimental survey in the Dominican Republic that featured three types of interviewer: from out of town (outsiders); local but unknown to the respondent (local-strangers); and local with a previous relationship to the resp…
The exclusion from welfare benefits
Modern Hungers
This book explores Germany’s role in the two world wars and the Cold War to analyze the food economy of the twentieth century. It argues that controlling food supply and determining how and what people ate shaped the course of these three wars. Because Germany played a central role in these conflicts, the political and economic ambitions of its changing governments had international ramifications. At the same time, focusing on changing methods of…
Poverty and Welfare in Modern German History
When I first moved to Berlin in 1999, debates over the country’s welfare system were ubiquitous. The spread of poverty throughout the former GDR, especially among East German women who suffered disproportionately from the dismantling of East Germany’s social support system and who found it near-impossible to find full-time employment, famously made them the ‘losers of reunification’, and prompted both East and West Germans to question the economi…
Land cover change and fertility in West-Central Africa
Own-Choice Marriage and Fertility in Turkey
Goode's foundational work on the fertility transition identified own-choice marriage as a factor driving fertility decline, part of a widening repertoire of choice pertaining to marriage and childbearing. Yet research supporting this connection in today's transitional societies is scarce and somewhat contradictory, and it is unclear how other marital traditions, such as consanguineous marriage, shape this relationship. This study evaluates Goode'…
Sociology (22 works) · Political science (19 works) · Economics (15 works) · Geography (12 works) · Politics (11 works) · Psychology (11 works) · Law (10 works) · Demography (8 works) · Social science (8 works) · Poverty, Education, and Child Welfare (7 works)