Are step-parents always evil? Parental death, remarriage, and child survival in demographically saturated Krummhörn (1720-1859) and expanding Québec (1670-1750)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Parental death precipitates a cascade of events leading to more or less detrimental exposures, from the sudden and dramatic interruption of parental care through the cohabitation with step parents and siblings in a recomposed family. This paper compares the effect of early parental loss on the survival of children in the past in the Krummhörn region of East Frisia (Germany) and in the French Canadians settlers of the Saint-Lawrence Valley (Quebec, Canada). The Krummhörn region was characterized by a saturated habitat with little expansion possibilities, while the opportunities for establishing a new family were virtually unlimited for the French Canadian settlers. These widely dissimilar environmental and socio-economic conditions led to contrasted impacts of early parental loss. Event history analyses with time-varying specification of family structure are used on a sample of 7,077 boys and 6,906 girls born between 1720 and 1859 in the Krummhörn region and 31,490 boys and 33,109 boys whose parents married between 1670 and 1750 in Québec. Results indicate that in both populations parental loss is associated with increased infant and child mortality. Maternal loss has a universal and consistent effect for both sexes, while the impact of paternal loss is less easy to establish and to interpret. The effect of the remarriage of the surviving spouse is population-specific: Mother’s remarriage has no effect in Krummhörn, while children in Quebec tended to benefit from the mother’s remarriage. In contrast, father’s remarriage in Krummhörn reduced dramatically the survival chances of the children born from his former marriage, while such effect was not seen for Quebec. These population-specific effects appear to be driven by availability of resources and call into question the universality of the so-called “Cinderella” effect.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".