Scientific Presentations

LabTalks@­SocialDemography

Department Social Demography
Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (MPIDR), Rostock, Germany, April 22, 2025

1:00 PM: Talk with Ilari Taskinen - Longitudinal study on the inequality and long-term effects of World War II on the Finnish male population

Abstract

My talk presents research on the effects of World War II for Finnish men and society conducted currently in project “Unequal War: Vulnerability, Stress and Survival in the Finnish Army during World War II” in Tampere University, Finland. The foundation of the project is a demographic “Finnish Army in World War II Database” (FA2W), which is based on a stratified random sample of 4,253 Finnish men who belonged to the birth cohorts (1897–1926) mobilized during World War II. The men and their data were picked from the military service record collection of the Finnish Army stored in the National Archives of Finland. The database is near representative of all Finnish men who were alive in draft age, including those who were exempted from army service. The database is very rich in detail with over 100 variables on men’s social background, medical information, war experiences and military career. The value of the database lies especially in its longitudinal data on soldiers’ war service, as it contains day-to-day information on soldiers’ military units and tasks, which can be linked to military unit’s casualty data, thus, enabling a detailed examination of soldiers’ differing exposure to violence in the war.

In the first stage our team focuses on the inequal distribution of casualties and war service between social groups and regions. In the next stage we envision to move to study the long-term effects of the war service by expanding the database with men’s post-war data. Other expansions to the database and side projects are also planned. One is already ongoing in project “Transgenerational Epigenetic Effects of War Stress” (TREES), in which our team collaborates with medical biologists to study whether soldiers’ war time stress, measured with data on exposure to violence, had epigenetic effects on their offspring and how these effects have possibly manifested. For this study, we have gathered additional war service data of 1429 men, which is compared to epigenetic data (blood samples) collected from their offspring in “The Cardiovascular Risk in Young Finns Study” between the 1980s and the 2010s.

LabTalk, April, 22th from 1 p.m. to 2:30 p.m. (Rostock time)