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1 Kincounts

Welcome to the kincounts research website.

1.1 Overview

This project models how fertility distributions shape sibling and broader kin-count distributions. It estimates fertility patterns from IPUMS data, derives sibling distributions, and simulates relative counts under alternative fertility models.

1.2 Key Features

  • Fertility Distribution Estimation: Fit zero-inflated negative binomial (ZINB) models to fertility count data
  • Relative Count Simulation: Generate simulated counts of relatives at various degrees

1.3 Interactive simulator

The Kincounts simulator is an interactive browser tool with two parts:

  • Fertility Fit — explore the empirical fertility and sibling distributions from the census data and how the ZINB, Poisson, and fixed-mean models capture them
  • Simulator — simulate kin-count distributions under a chosen fertility model across three generations

The simulator is built with React and deployed on Vercel: open the Kincounts simulator.

1.4 Methods

The models use a zero-inflated negative binomial (ZINB) distribution to capture fertility patterns, including childlessness. The analyses use those fertility models to derive sibling distributions and simulate counts of relatives across relationship categories. Fertility is estimated from IPUMS USA census microdata; see the preprocessing methods page for the data definitions and sample.

1.5 Repository Structure

  • analysis/: Quarto analysis pages (methods, model fitting, simulation)
  • simulator/: React + Vite interactive simulator (deployed to Vercel)
  • code/: utility scripts (including the generator that keeps the simulator in sync with the analysis)
  • data/: raw (local-only) and processed (shareable) data
  • docs/: generated website files
  • output/: analysis outputs

1.6 Getting Started

Explore the analyses using the navigation bar above, or open the interactive simulator.