Volume 38 - Article 10 | Pages 233–246  

Interdisciplinary Research on Healthy Aging: Introduction

By Frans Willekens, James R. Carey, Qiang Li

This article is part of the Special Collection 22 "Interdisciplinary Research on Healthy Aging"

Abstract

Background: This is an introduction to a Special Collection of Demographic Research on Interdisciplinary Research on Healthy Aging. The collection is an outcome of an international conference in China on biodemography and multistate modeling in healthy aging research. Causal analysis is the common theme of the papers. Healthy aging is an outcome of pathways of causally related distant and proximate determinants and intervening factors that mediate the effects of the determinants.

Objective: The objective is to introduce the papers in this SC and to highlight the place of multistate modeling in causal analysis.

Methods: We adopt the common distinction between structural causal modeling and dynamic causal modeling. The papers in the SC concentrate on structural causal modeling. Multistate models (and, more particularly, the continuous-time Markov process model) are oriented more toward dynamic causal modeling. In dynamic causal modeling the causal dependencies are defined in terms of events (outcomes), exposure time, and transition rates that relate exposures to events.

Results: The contributions to the SC illustrate the progress made in structural causal modeling in the study of healthy aging. Dynamic causal analysis, however, has progressed comparatively slowly.

Contribution: The papers in the SC and the brief introduction to multistate modeling in causal analysis pave the way to enhanced causal analysis in the study of healthy aging and in demography.

Author's Affiliation

• Frans Willekens - Nederlands Interdisciplinair Demografisch Instituut (NIDI), the Netherlands EMAIL
• James R. Carey - University of California, Davis, United States of America EMAIL
• Qiang Li - East China Normal University, China EMAIL

Other articles by the same author/authors in Demographic Research

Programmatic access to open statistical data for population studies: The SDMX standard
Volume 49 - Article 40

Population aging caused by a rise in the sex ratio at birth
Volume 43 - Article 32

Visualizing compositional data on the Lexis surface
Volume 36 - Article 21

Software for multistate analysis
Volume 31 - Article 14

Chronological objects in demographic research
Volume 28 - Article 23

Biodemography: Research prospects and directions
Volume 19 - Article 50

Most recent similar articles in Demographic Research

Open science practices in demographic research: An appraisal
Volume 50 - Article 43    | Keywords: demography, open access data, population studies, replicability, reproducibility

Racial classification as a multistate process
Volume 50 - Article 17    | Keywords: Brazil, demography, increments to life, life expectancy, life table, mortality, multistate, race/ethnicity

Estimation of confidence intervals for decompositions and other complex demographic estimators
Volume 49 - Article 5    | Keywords: bootstrap, confidence interval, decomposition, demography, Monte-Carlo simulation, standard error

The growth of education differentials in marital dissolution in the United States
Volume 45 - Article 26    | Keywords: demography, divorce, education, family, family structure, marriage, stratification

Editorial to the Special Issue on Demographic Data Visualization: Getting the point across – Reaching the potential of demographic data visualization
Volume 44 - Article 36    | Keywords: data visualization, demographic data, demography