Family matters universally, but how and why in East Asia differs by patriarchy and family systems. This thesis not only aims for a better comparative understanding of co-resident kin effects on individual demographic disparities throughout the life course – child survival, lifetime reproductive success, and old-age mortality – across East Asian populations in the past, but also examines how macro family systems condition such micro family influence. I make use of five recently available datasets, consisting of some 4 million panel observations of more than 650,000 individuals who lived between 1678 and 1945 in northeast China, northeast Japan, southeast Korea, and north Taiwan. Most previous comparative population studies compare patterns of associations of family context and in...[ Read more ]

Family matters universally, but how and why in East Asia differs by patriarchy and family systems. This thesis not only aims for a better comparative understanding of co-resident kin effects on individual demographic disparities throughout the life course – child survival, lifetime reproductive success, and old-age mortality – across East Asian populations in the past, but also examines how macro family systems condition such micro family influence. I make use of five recently available datasets, consisting of some 4 million panel observations of more than 650,000 individuals who lived between 1678 and 1945 in northeast China, northeast Japan, southeast Korea, and north Taiwan. Most previous comparative population studies compare patterns of associations of family context and individual behavior between separate analyses on each population. This thesis, instead, standardizes, harmonizes, and pools data from all study populations, and employs a multilevel modeling approach to directly examine the effects of the presence/absence of kin and other family structural characteristics at the micro level and to model their interactions with family system measures at the macro level across populations and periods. This thesis provides detailed evidence that, on top of the salient patriarchal influence shared among these East Asian historical populations, macro family system and micro family context interact to shape individual demographic behavior throughout the life course.