The aim of this study is to examine the geographic patterning of suicide rates across townships and the temporal evolution from 1980 to 2000 in Taiwan and to shed light on the appropriateness of spatial clustering mechanisms of local suicide rates in Taiwan, including both Durkheim's structural hypothesis and Tarde's imitation hypothesis. A spatial analysis of data from a mortality database and population and housing census data of Taiwan from 1980 to 2000 was conducted. The results of exploratory spatial data analysis show that township-level suicide rates exhibit significant spatial dependence in Taiwan. Clusters of high suicide rates are found in aboriginal areas and east townships, whereas those of low rates are detected in the metropolitan areas. The degree of spatial dependence of local suicide rates in Taiwan has weakened from 1980 to 2000. Controlling for effects of social fragmentation and resource deprivation, local suicide rates still manifest persistent spatial clustering patterns. The Lagrange Multiplier diagnostics support the Durkheimian perspective that the spatial clustering of suicide was only due to structural similarity between spatial units. And, the spatial imitation perspective suggested by Tarde plays no significant role in shaping the spatial clustering pattern of suicide in the Taiwan area. The results of spatial error models also indicate that the more severe the degree of social fragmentation and resource deprivation, the higher the rates of suicide local townships experience.

During the past decades, many developed and developing countries have experienced a steady increase in their elderly population. With an increase in the proportion of the elderly in the population, the focus of public health also needs major adjustments in health policies in order to face challenges due to change in age composition. One major problem in the elderly population is to deal with depression. This research used representative panel sample survey data collected in the five waves of ”The Longitudinal Sample Survey of Health and Living Status of the Elderly in Taiwan” conducted in 1989, 1993, 1996, 1999 and 2003 by the predecessor organization of the Bureau of Health Promotion, Department of Health. Based on a panel sample of elderly who were 60 years old and over at the time of the first interview in 1989 and re-interviewed in 1993, 1996, 1999 and 2003, a complete set of depression scale (CES-D) data was used for this analysis. A depression index score (CES-D score) was constructed from ten items to measure the level of depression, and the elderly with a CES-D score equal or higher than 10 (CES-D≧10) were regarded as depressed (depression status). The purpose of this panel study is to explore the effect of various factors, e.g. health status, home and environment, and social and economic situation, on the changing status of depression of the elderly in Taiwan. Both Regression and Logistic Regression models are adopted to investigate the factors related to depression among the elderly in 5 waves of a cross-sectional survey. In addition, a Generalized Estimating Equation (GEE) accounts for the correlation among repeated observations, and a Recurrent Survival Model, which unites the recurrent events of depression in the five-wave survey, are employed for analyzing the changing status of depression and its related factors among the elderly in Taiwan.

The author argues that class position is an important but neglected aspect of developing cross-border migration, especially for people moving from more- to less- developed countries. Single professional Taiwanese females in China are one such group of migrants. It is helpful to examine the influence of class on migration when the class gap between the migrants and the host society is obvious but the gap in ethnicity is little.
Most of the supporting information was gathered during informal but in-depth interviews with 14 single Taiwanese women in Dongguan and Shanghai, supplemented by data from ethnography on interviewees' daily lives in 2004-2005 and 2008-2009. The data indicate that despite these Taiwanese respondents' diverse backgrounds, all respondents had class position higher than most local Chinese. Due to this class gap, respondents were reluctant to mix with the locals, especially in terms of dating with Mainland Chinese men, unless these Chinese were definitely from the privileged class. Without the proper social life and intimate relationships, most respondents felt lonely and reluctant to settle down.
The finding of class influence on immigrants' daily lives has been little explored in the field of migration. It not only explains why respondents were reluctant to integrate with the host society, but also suggests a new direction of research for the fields of migration studies and class studies in the future.

The government can engage in better policy planning if the future population and its structure can be known in advance. This is especially true for local governments (e.g. at the county or township level) due to limited resources. Like many countries, Taiwan has been experiencing rapid population aging, and the allocation of resources has become very important. The aim of this paper is to find an appropriate method for projecting populations of small areas in Taiwan.
First, we use 3 areas (county level) of Taiwan: Taipei City, Yunlin & Chiayi, and PengHu, to explore whether the cohort component method can be used for small area population projection. Also, to decide the future values of birth, death, and migration, we experiment with several probabilistic methods, including the Lee-Carter model, block bootstrap, sieve bootstrap, and functional principal component analysis. The block bootstrap is chosen for its simplicity and good accuracy. Combining the block bootstrap with the cohort component, we found that migration plays an important role in small area projection, while birth is more important in country level projection.