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NOTE
April 2012 - I moved to the Institute for Social & Economic Research at the University of Essex. Please see below website.
https://www.iser.essex.ac.uk/people/pmathews
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I am in the final year of an ESRC funded PhD in Demography / Population Studies based in the Department of Social Policy, London School of Economics and Political Science. My general research area is fertility.
My main supervisor is Dr Rebecca Sear and my secondary supervisor is Dr Wendy Sigle-Rushton. I'm interested in lots of research topics including (in no particular order)... evolutionary explanations for low fertility, the influence of social networks & mortality on reproductive behaviour, attitudes towards childbearing, the consequences of low fertility and policies that influence fertility, human behavioural ecology, the effects of question ordering in social surveys and finally systematic reviews of academic research.
I am interested in both quantitative and qualitative demographic research though I seem to be mainly using quantitative methods at the moment.
With a fair amount of help from Rebecca, I conducted an internet experiment looking at the relationship between perceptions of mortality and fertility preferences which was been published in September 2008 by the Journal of Evolutionary Psychology. The press release and full paper can be found here.
For my PhD I have expanding upon this work and I'm also looking at the relationship between the kin orientation of social networks and reproduction using the British Household Panel Study. In 2009 I also undertook some work with Dr Heather Booth from the Australian Demographic & Social Research Institute, Australian National University looking at the effects of Social Networks on Self Reported Health.
If you are interested in my research and have any questions or comments please contact me at p.s.mathews at lse.ac.uk
Publications (only 1 so far!)
2008
Life after death: An investigation into how mortality perceptions influence fertility preferences using evidence from an internet-based experiment
Paul Mathews and Rebecca Sear
Both life history theory and demographic transition theory predict that fertility responds to changes in mortality, but there have been relatively few tests which identify links between mortality perceptions and fertility preferences at the individual level. This paper provides an individual-level investigation of the relationship between mortality and fertility, by testing whether mortality priming results in an increase in fertility preferences. Data were collected via an internet-based experiment of students at the London School of Economics (LSE), who were randomly allocated between two questionnaires. The treatment questionnaire asked a set of mortality priming questions and then collected information on fertility preferences and attitudes towards the costs and benefits of children. The control questionnaire recorded information on fertility preferences without prior mortality priming. The results suggest that mortality priming resulted in higher ideal number of children for males, but not for females. There were no significant differences in the attitudes towards the costs and benefits of children for either sex, though the raw data suggest a slight shift towards viewing children as less costly after mortality-priming, particularly for men. This paper therefore argues that the reaction of fertility to mortality may be at least partly mediated by a direct psychological link between mortality perceptions and reproductive behaviour (using analysis from my MSc Social Research Methods Dissertation).
Conference and seminar presentations
2011
2010
International Behavioural Ecology Congress, Perth, Australia
British Society for Population Studies, Exeter, UK
European Population Conference, Vienna, Austria
European Human Behaviour and Evolution Association, Wroclaw, Poland
2009
International Union of the Scientific Study of Population, Marrakesh, Morocco
British Society for Population Studies, Brighton, UK
British Household Panel Study, Colchester, UK
2008
British Society for Population Studies, Manchester, UK
European Association for Population Studies, Barcelona, Spain (poster)
European Human Behaviour and Evolution, Montpelier, France
Other things about me
I am a member of the following societies: The British Society for Population Studies, European Human Behaviour and Evolution Association, International Union for the Scientific Study of Population, European Association for Population Studies, International Society for Behavioural Ecology
I have worked as a civil servant in several UK Government departments.
I was born in 1981 in Hertfordshire and I currently live in Islington, North London. I have British citizenship and mild dyslexia.
Last update: 29 March 2011