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The article presents the abstracts of the papers which appeared in this issue of the journal. Regarding the article "Structure and Behavior in the Social Demography of Africa," the abstract focuses on the role of culture in determining demographic behavior in sub-Saharan Africa has attracted increasing attention. But in theorizing about "culture," demographers have tended to draw on the work of British structural functional anthropologists, who saw behavior as determined by social norms that were in turn generated by underlying social structures, functional in nature. This has led to a number of features: an emphasis on macrolevel associations; a working assumption that behavior is governed by norms; the analysis of change solely in terms of external forces; and the use of generalized descriptions of both ideas and behavior in African societies. For "Consequences of Son Preference in a Low-Fertility Society: Imbalance of the Sex Ratio at Birth in Korea," abstract states that many demographers and population planners have considered son preference in Asian countries to be a major barrier to reducing fertility. Some of these countries, such as South Korea and China, however, have recently achieved replacement-level fertility, in spite of their strong adherence to son preference.

Suicide is not only an individual phenomenon, but it is also influenced by social and environmental factors. With the high suicide rate and the abundance of social media data in South Korea, we have studied the potential of this new medium for predicting completed suicide at the population level. We tested two social media variables (suicide-related and dysphoria-related weblog entries) along with classical social, economic and meteorological variables as predictors of suicide over 3 years (2008 through 2010). Both social media variables were powerfully associated with suicide frequency. The suicide variable displayed high variability and was reactive to celebrity suicide events, while the dysphoria variable showed longer secular trends, with lower variability. We interpret these as reflections of social affect and social mood, respectively. In the final multivariate model, the two social media variables, especially the dysphoria variable, displaced two classical economic predictors – consumer price index and unemployment rate. The prediction model developed with the 2-year training data set (2008 through 2009) was validated in the data for 2010 and was robust in a sensitivity analysis controlling for celebrity suicide effects. These results indicate that social media data may be of value in national suicide forecasting and prevention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]