Rebecca Sear

Rebecca  Sear

Rebecca's background is interdisciplinary: having received training in zoology, statistics and biological anthropology, she has spent most of her career teaching demography, first at the London School of Economics and now at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. She took up her current post as Reader in Population and Health at LSHTM in April 2012, and now heads the Evolutionary Demography Group there. Rebecca's research interests lie in evolutionary demography, mainly focused in two areas: investigating the impact of kin on reproductive outcomes and examining interactions between health and reproduction. Initially her research was based in sub-Saharan Africa, but she is now interested in comparative work, testing the same hypotheses in a variety of ecological settings to establish their ecological variability. She is currently working on a European Research Council funded project 'Family matters: intergenerational influences on fertility', which aims to test the influence of kin on fertility across a range of populations, using both small-scale datasets from traditional subsistence populations and large-scale, nationally representative demographic datasets.

Contact

Brunel University London

Rebecca.Sear@brunel.ac.uk
+44 20 7299 4682
Homepage

Articles by Rebecca Sear

Articles in PubMed
Articles in Google Scholar

21 May 2025 | research material

Household structure in Ghana: Exploring dynamics over three decades

Josephine Akua Ackah Baafi, Rebecca Sear, Estelle McLean, Kofi Awusabo-Asare, Anushé Hassan, Fabian Sebastian Achana, Sarah Walters

Volume: 52 Article ID: 30
Pages: 971–1022
DOI: 10.4054/DemRes.2025.52.30

20 August 2024 | research article

Transitions to adulthood in men and women in rural Malawi in the 21st century using sequence analysis: Some evidence of delay

Estelle McLean, Maria Sironi, Albert Dube, Emma Slaymaker, Amelia C Crampin, Rebecca Sear

Volume: 51 Article ID: 14
Pages: 459–500
DOI: 10.4054/DemRes.2024.51.14

24 July 2019 | research article

Earning their keep? Fostering, children's education, and work in north-western Tanzania

Sophie Hedges, Rebecca Sear, Jim Todd, Mark Urassa, David Lawson

Volume: 41 Article ID: 10
Pages: 263–292
DOI: 10.4054/DemRes.2019.41.10

18 August 2017 | research article

Supportive families versus support from families: The decision to have a child in the Netherlands

Susan Schaffnit, Rebecca Sear

Volume: 37 Article ID: 14
Pages: 414–454
DOI: 10.4054/DemRes.2017.37.14

10 March 2016 | research article

Does grandparental help mediate the relationship between kin presence and fertility?

Kristin Snopkowski, Rebecca Sear

Volume: 34 Article ID: 17
Pages: 467–498
DOI: 10.4054/DemRes.2016.34.17

15 February 2013 | research article

Does the kin orientation of a British woman’s social network influence her entry into motherhood?

Paul Mathews, Rebecca Sear

Volume: 28 Article ID: 11
Pages: 313–340
DOI: 10.4054/DemRes.2013.28.11