Wiktoria Wróblewska

The level of vaccination against COVID-19 in Europe varied widely, despite the generally widespread availability of vaccines since 2021. This study investigates the regional diversity of vaccination attitudes among people aged 50 or over in Central and Eastern European countries (CEE) and the association between personality and COVID-19 vaccination attitudes on the individual level. The data were obtained from Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE), Eurostat and the European Quality of Government Index. The 11 countries were divided into 62 to 259 regions, primarily based on SHARE Internal NUTS release. The logistic regression of vaccination attitudes showed that high agreeableness, low neuroticism and, less importantly, high openness, are positively associated with vaccination willingness. Vaccination willingness increases with age and education and is higher for each of three respondent characteristics: multimorbidity, living with a partner, and living in urban areas...

The study concerns the assessment of the health of older adults in selected European countries using summary measures of population health. These measures show to what extent increasing life span goes hand in hand with a healthier life, and to what extent it is burdened by health limitations and disability. This paper covers such health domains as self-perceived health, functional limitations, chronic morbidity and disability. Data on the health of people aged 60 and over came from Wave 7 of SHARE, and Sullivan’s method was used to calculate health expectancy measures. The multivariate nature of the health status measurement prompted us to also use a multivariate comparative analysis and to determine a synthetic measure of health status. The results showed large disproportions in health expectancy indicators in the later years of life of men and women in the European countries analysed, and these differences are greater than those relating to life expectancy.

Poland is a Catholic country and is one of a few countries in Europe where the percentage of people declaring themselves as non-believing remains rather low. Thus, most young Poles are brought up in Catholic families and receive religious instruction at school.The purpose of this study is to estimate the effects of religiosity and gender on the risk of first intercourse before age 18 among university students in Poland. We analysed data from two comparative studies of affective life, sexual behaviour, and attitudes conducted among university students in 2001 and 2013. We used survival analysis techniques to test for relative differences in the effects of religiosity on the timing of first sexual intercourse. While the results confirm that religiosity was a significant differentiating factor in the sexual behaviours of students in Poland, they also show that religiosity was a significant predictor of sexual abstinence only if a young person regarded religion as very important. The unadjusted median age at first sex for the participants who attached no or little importance to religion was more than 2 years lower than the median age among those who considered religion very important and attended church services regularly. The findings also indicate that there were significant gender differences, with young males transitioning to sex earlier than young females, albeit only among the 2001 cohort. The multivariate analyses confirm the absence of significant gender differences in FSI before age 18 within religious groups (controlling for other factors) in the cohort of students born after 1990. The results for control variables are consistent with the literature indicating that growing up in a two-parent household has a protective effect, and that teenage lifestyles are significant. Our observation of a distinct polarity of students with respect to religiosity and the timing of sexual debut may be a starting point for further analyses of FSI determinants.

Since the 1990s, life expectancy at birth in Poland has increased by over three months on average each year for both sexes. However, in recent years there has been a decrease in life expectancy, and the number of deaths increased by 6% for men and 8% for women between 2016 and 2018. The aim of this study is to identify the subpopulations most sensitive to the recent changes in mortality in Poland. The increase in deaths is described with regard to changes in age distribution of the population and age at death contributing to life expectancy changes in recent years is analysed. The findings serve as a basis for making references to theoretical knowledge and proposals for future research directions as well as recommendations for public statistics and social policy. The increase in the number of deaths is a new phenomenon that cannot be accounted for by the size differences between the cohorts born between the two world wars and during the Second World War or the ageing of the baby-boom generations. The greatest contributors to the decreasing life expectancy are deaths at older age. This and the fast growing population aged 85 years and more indicate a need to devote more research attention to analysing mortality in the oldest age groups. It is also emphasised that the elderly are potentially the most prone to various threats associated with an excessive number of deaths, including inadequate health care funding.

Praca dotyczy oceny stanu zdrowia i umieralności województwa łódzkiego na tle sytuacji ogólnopolskiej oraz województw o najlepszych wskaźnikach trwania życia. Do analizy wykorzystano metodę dekompozycji różnic w trwaniu życia według płci i grup wieku. Zastosowana metoda pozwoliła na identyfikację grup wieku, w których zmiany w umieralności miały największy wpływ na poziom parametru eо. Podjęte zagadnienie ma istotne znaczenie w świetle obserwowanej od lat depopulacji województwa łódzkiego.

[b] Abstract Introduction and objective[/b]. This study examines the geographical variation of amenable mortality in Poland, focusing primarily on the role of health care resources at the level of administrative districts and regions, and[b] [/b]selected area socioeconomic characteristics as...

The article presents the life-table dispersion measures and analysis results for Poland with special regard to the process of mortality compression. The following measures were analysed: Gini coefficient, average inter-individual difference in age at death, modal age at death, inter-quartile range, standard deviation above the modal age at death, person-years lost (e-dagger) and index of mortality entropy. The empirical analysis employed data for the years 1958–2014 derived from the Human Mortality Database (HMD). The observed tendency towards reduction in the dispersion of age at death was not uniform during the 50 year span analysed and actually stagnated in certain periods. In particular, the results for the male population do not indicate a definite trend towards reduction in mortality dispersion. The results for the female population demonstrate a reduction in age dispersion at death among women over time with regard to all measures, with the modal age at death advancing towards progressively older age groups. The dispersion measures utilised in this study and the results can be used in further research on mortality compression in Poland.

In this paper, we investigate the significance of health in the fertility choices made by women in Poland. We use data from the first wave of the Polish “Generations and Gender Survey” (GGS-PL), which was conducted at the turn of 2010 and 2011. We verify whether women who are disabled or who experience health problems limit their childbearing intentions. In our analyses, we use four different indicators for health. Our results suggest that all four might be important when planning a child in the subsequent three-year period. Nevertheless, our multivariate analyses indicate that only women’s self-rated health remains significant, if age, parity and marital status are controlled for.

An effective health policy can be only conducted on the basis of complete and up-to-date statistical data referring to, among others, causes of deaths. The share of deaths due to unknown and ill-defined causes constitutes one of quality indicators of data on mortality. As compared to other European countries, in Poland this share is relatively high, especially in some regions of the country. Presented analysis is devoted to spatial differences of mortality due to unknown and ill-defined causes in 1991–1995 and 2006–2010. Despite the introduction of the 10th revision of the International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems, as well as despite the modernization of data collecting system in 1997, spatial differences remained at a constant and moderate level, which probably results from the prevalence of local coding practices. We propose possible solutions that could contribute to decrease in share of death due to unknown and ill-defined causes in Poland, among them standardization of local coding procedures concerning causes of death.