Bereavement Multipliers: Levels and Sources of Crossnational Differences in Losing Close Family

Résumé

Mortality research has traditionally treated death as an individual event measured through annualised rates. While this approach is essential for monitoring population-level mortality, it reveals little about how mortality is experienced by individuals. In practice, individuals encounter death not as statistical rates but through the loss of members of their social networks. This insight has motivated the emerging demography of bereavement, which seeks to quantify the structure and dynamics of kin loss. Despite its promise, the field lacks unified and standardised metrics. Existing studies have provided illustrative estimates--for example, research on the COVID-19 pandemic suggested that each death in the United States left roughly nine bereaved close kin (Verdery et al. 2020)--but these calculations are context-specific and not easily generalisable across populations. Here, we introduce a formal definition of 'bereavement multipliers,' a measure that captures the extent to which a single death is amplified through pre-existing kinship structures, generating experiences of kin loss among multiple members of the population. Our generalised methodology can be used to estimate bereavement multipliers by age, sex, and cause of death in any population using tools from mathematical demography. Preliminary results reveal substantial variation in the multiplicative effects of mortality, driven by the age-sex distribution of deaths and the underlying structure of kinship networks. The framework used to estimate bereavement multipliers can also be extended to measure the family prevalence of any age-sex structured condition within a population.