Jeroen Spijker is PSC resident April and May

Jeroen Spijker is currently a PSC Visiting Scholar from the Demographic Studies Center in Barcelona, Spain. The purpose of his stay at PSC is to investigate household patterns of the elderly in low- and medium-income countries.

Jeroen obtained a Bachelor of Arts degree at Massey University, New Zealand, with majors in sociology and human geography. He later returned to his country of birth, The Netherlands, to complete a Master’s degree and subsequently a PhD in demography at the University of Groningen. Since 2002 he has been working on his research in Barcelona, Spain at the Demographic Studies Center. Although his PhD research was on “Socioeconomic determinants of regional mortality differences in Europe”, as a post-doc he has been involved in a number of different fields within demography and family sociology. His publications include articles on mortality in Catalonia in the context of the latter phases of the epidemiological transition, regional mortality differences in Spain in 1960 and 1970, cohort changes in height and weight, the effect of being a caregiver on labor force participation, the evolution of the widowed population in Spain and family trajectories after widowhood and divorce.

Since 2010 Jeroen has conducted research on changing union formation patterns and inter-generational co-residence among young adults in low- to middle-income countries with special emphasis on the effect of educational expansion.

Jeroen will be in residence until May 31, 2012. Interested parties can contact him in the Family and Demography Program, room 2276 ISR, or at jspijker@umich.edu