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Helsinki Institute for Demography and Population Health presents PopHel Talks, where we showcase our latest research. Our work explores various topics in demography and population health, with an emphasis on social inequalities. If you are interested in hearing our presentations, please so we can send a Zoom link to you.

On 13th October, Joonas Pitkänen will be presenting at PopHel Talks on family-based designs in childhood adversity research.

 Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) are typically conceptualized as experiences of different types of maltreatment, neglect, or household dysfunction, of which the latter consists of experiences related to parents and the family environment, such as parental mental health and substance use problems and parental incarceration. Previous studies have shown that ACEs are robust risk factors of a wide array of different health, behavioural and social outcomes, including, for instance, common psychiatric disorders, problematic alcohol use, criminal behaviour and not being in education, employment, or training. These studies have mostly used standard regression models with adjustment for confounders available in data. However, more recent work in the field suggests that the population-level estimates may be upwardly biased due to unobserved familial confounding in these associations. This presentation will show examples from two studies, which utilize register data and explore this confounding by using family fixed effects models. The results of these studies indicate the presence of familial confounding, but also that the amount of this is dependent on the studied exposure-outcome pairs, and that the associations between the studied ACEs and the elevated risk of mental health, behavioural and social outcomes remain in the family comparisons. Limitations of the studies are discussed. In addition, a short introduction of the research consortium ACElife will be given.

Aapo Hiilamo (Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research and MaxHel Center) presents: Children’s out-of-home care in Finland, 1993–2020: lifetime risks, expectancies, exit routes, and number of placements for synthetic cohorts. This presentation seeks answers to questions like:

• How likely it is that a newborn child will ever enter out-of-home care?
• How many years, on average, this child will spend in care?
• How likely it is that the child will ever reunify with their family after being placed in care?

We warmly welcome you to join us for our seminar PopHel Talks in Zoom. Our first presenter will be Alvaro Obeso with the title “Microevolutionary genetic processes of Roma population based in the Basque country: A Short Tandem Repeat based study.” This presentation will focus on: 

• Understanding the microevolutionary processes experienced by the Roma population during their migration from northwestern India, including the impact of genetic drift and gene flow. 
• Characterizing the Y chromosome lineages to gain deeper insight into the male ancestry, with evidence suggesting a possible southeastern Indian origin.