Search

The contributors to this discussion were invited to submit comments, each from a different standpoint, on the paper by John Caldwell and Thomas Schindlmayr that appeared in the preceding issue of the journal. The invitation was issued with the approval of these authors, and the journal is grateful to them for allowing their paper to be used to generate debate on the issues they had raised. The discussion is followed by the authors' response to it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The object of this paper is to outline the results of a different method of studying marital breakdown. The opportunity for making such a study has recently arisen in the course of a national questionnaire survey of child health and growth. The chief purpose of this national survey is to build up a picture of the health and development of a broad sample of British children born in March 1946. While it was not primarily designed with the intention of investigating the subject of marital breakdown, it has provided information on its extent among British families bringing up young children in the post-war years. Furthermore, the survey has given an opportunity for contrasting the home conditions and physical development of children growing up in broken homes with those of a closely matched group of children living in stable families. This paper deals only with the extreme and obvious cases of marital breakdown, and it is restricted to those broken homes in which a legitimate child has continued to live with his or her remaining parent. The few children, who have been entirely removed from parental custody to the care of adoptive or foster-parents or children's homes, and those who were illegitimate, have not been included. It was found that while home circumstances differed considerably, the children of broken homes were not excessively retarded, nor on the whole were they more prone to suffer from childhood ailments or behavior disturbances than those in stable families.

The paper presents a new type of parametric transition rate model that is particularly suitable for studying household and union formation. In such studies, it is often not easy to determine the moment at which individuals actually enter the population at risk - or at least when the risk begins to become socially important. Even in the presence of regulations stipulated by law, one might be interested in studying 'social' timetables. We assume that there is a constant rate for any duration and that after a certain threshold point a log-logistic rate is added, with this threshold as its time origin. This can be justified in a behavioural sense by assuming that random and social transitions arise from separate processes. We then apply the model to union formation in Italy and show how threshold and intensity effects generated by theoretical hypotheses can be revealed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since its inception in 1974, the South African family planning programme has been widely believed to be linked with white fears of growing black numbers. The programme has been repeatedly attacked by detractors as a programme of social and political control. Yet, in spite of the hostile environment, black women's use of services has steadily increased. Using historical and anthropological evidence, this paper delineates the links between the social and political context of racial domination and individual fertility behaviour. It is argued that the quantitative success of the family planning programme is rooted in social and economic shifts conditioning reproductive authority and fertility decision-making. State policies of racial segregation and influx control, ethnic 'homeland' politics, and labour migration of men transformed opportunities and constraints for black women and men, and altered local and household expectations of childbearing. Women came to manage their own fertility as they increasingly found themselves in precarious social and economic circumstances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper documents increasing cohabitation in the United States, and the implications of this trend for the family lives of children. The stability of marriage-like relationships (including marriage and cohabitation) has decreased - despite a constant divorce rate. Children increasingly live in cohabiting families either as a result of being born to cohabiting parents or of their mother's entry into a cohabiting union. The proportion of births to unmarried women born into cohabiting families increased from 29 to 39 per cent in the period 1980-84 to 1990-94, accounting for almost all of the increase in unmarried childbearing. As a consequence, about two-fifths of all children spend some time in a cohabiting family, and the greater instability of families begun by cohabitation means that children are also more likely to experience family disruption. Estimates from multi-state life tables indicate the extent to which the family lives of children are spent increasingly in cohabiting families and decreasingly in married families. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From the earliest stages of the British fertility decline, falling mean family size was accompanied by marked rises in the proportion of married women who remained childless or who bore only a single child. This paper summarises those changes, their impact on average family size, and the implications for estimates of the proportions of couples who attempted to space their children in the early years of marriage. The explanatory power of some commonly cited interpretations of the general decline in marital fertility is then considered in the context of this growth in number of families of highly restricted fertility. The paper highlights a need for more emphasis on descriptive and analytical approaches that are sensitive to distributions within populations. Also emphasized is the importance of developing interpretations that allow for the possibility that different factors may operate on different sub-sets of families at different points in time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The object of this paper is to assess how far developments in the labour market can help to explain the fluctuations in births which have been recorded in England and Wales between 1952 and 1980. We examine separately the period rate of women from each of the first four parities proceeding to another birth. Our analysis shows that different birth orders respond differently to economic variables, and that women of different ages but the same parity respond differently. We have found that growing real wages for both men and women tend to deter older parents from adding to existing families. During the early stages of family building, births are inhibited by labour markets favourable to women. But conditions in the labour market for men have the opposite effect on early breeding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In ordinary demographic projection, the starting age structure of a population ceases to matter after a time, whatever changes the birth and death rates undergo within bounds. The inhomogeneous or 'weak' ergodic theorem asserts this eventual independence of starting state. Does the same independence hold true for inverse projection? This paper proves that the answer is 'yes' provided the model life-table family satisfies certain reasonable conditions, but that the answer can be 'no', if more extreme life-table families are allowed. The inhomogeneous ergodic theorem for inverse projection proved here, and the counter-examples to its extension, have implications for the validation of aggregative reconstructions in historical demography and to the contemporary forecasting of sub-populations subject to constraints. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper a theory of marital fertility transition that treats birth control diffusion processes and the effects of mortality decline and economic and social development on fertility within a common analytical framework is developed. Utility-cost concepts provide the means for an integrated treatment. Family size utility functions are used and the theory is focused on the effects of development and diffusion on the utilities and costs of alternative family sizes. The principal innovation lies in the conceptualization and analysis of diffusion of birth control, in which the psychic costs of violating social norms against birth control play a central role. When norms shift in favour of birth control, the psychic costs of birth control fall, causing a decline in the demand for children. In highly integrated populations this process can occur very rapidly, resulting in rapid diffusion of birth control and sudden and rapid fertility decline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the impact of the demographic transition upon the potential supply of, and demand for, family support for the aged in Australia. Using census and survey information on population cohorts entering old age, comparisons are drawn concerning their surviving issue, household composition and family membership. Long-term changes in fertility are shown to have had only a small impact upon the supply of potential carers among relatives and, although the demographic transition has led to a more universal inclusion of old people in family networks, there have not been major changes through time in the proportions living in extended family households. Short-term changes, however, such as low fertility during the 1930s, have caused disordered cohort flow, with the result that current generations of the elderly are members of deprived cohorts in terms of their access to family support. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous research on the relationship between extended family residence and fertility has produced conflicting findings. In the present paper, we avoid a major shortcoming of past work by focusing on residence and fertility at a given stage of the life-cycle, i.e. the stage following first marriage. Results show that residence with husband's parents reduces age at marriage. Residence with wife's parents shows no such consistent effect. No evidence was found to support the claim that extended family residence consistently affects the length of the interval between marriage and the first birth. These findings are consistent across four cultural/ethnic groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper was developed with two purposes in mind: first to extend the study of the family life cycle for this sub-population on the United States back to the 1800 birth cohort and secondly to examine the features of the family life cycle under conditions of high natural fertility. Evidence Consistent with a natural-fertility regime is presented using Mormon genealogies of married women who were born between 1800 and 1869. The family life cycle for this high-fertility population indicates how the reproductive potential of a population is tempered by life-cycle phenomena. Age at marriage greatly affects completed family size: Women who married by the age of 20 average about nine live births against an average of only six for women married at age 25. However. the age at birth of the last child is high and unrelated to age at marriage as would be expected under conditions of natural fertility. By using direct information on the age at death for these couples. we find that the average age at dissolution of the conjugal unit has not varied by more than a few years and has consistently been in the mid 60's. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Volume VI of the "Papers of the Royal Commission on Population," D. V. Glass and E. Grebenik present a model for estimating distributions of desired family size. The term "intended family size" will be used to designate children ever born under these hypothetical conditions of absent sterility and perfect birth control. This is to distinguish it from the family size that a couple might report as their "ideal" or "preferred" family size. This paper does not attempt a comprehensive evaluation but focuses on three aspects. First, evidence is given that asking couples for their fertility "preferences" or for their family size "ideals" does not adequately measure "intended family size." The second question raised in this paper is whether the model has yet attained its most efficient form. The assumption that the chances of another unintentional birth remain constant irrespective of the number preceding it is not only suspect, it leads to misleading results. Third, suggestions are made for modifying the model. The modifications would complicate the model but also add to its possible uses. In the passage from early marriage to later marriage, "private ideals" and "fertility preferences" change from expectations of future fertility to recollections of past intentions. This necessitates discussing "fertility preferences" in relation to more than one period of marriage.

This paper presents a study of the influence of children's marriage form and other characteristics on whether married couples in three villages in rural China establish a family separate from the joint family of their natal kin. The results reveal that, for children with a brother, sons in virilocal marriages are more likely than daughters in uxorilocal marriages to establish a family separate from that of their parents and do so earlier than these daughters. However, among children without a brother, sons and daughters do not differ significantly in whether or when they divide off from their extended family and set up a new family. The majority of family division occurs in the first 5 years after marriage for sons and daughters. Number of siblings and other characteristics also affect the likelihood of family division. We discuss demographic, socio-economic, and cultural causes underlying this phenomenon as well as its social implications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the effect of previous cohabitation on marital stability among the 1958 British birth cohort. Prospective data from the National Child Development Study are used to investigate the way in which family background factors and early lifecourse experiences, including cohabitation, affect the risk of first marriage dissolution by age 33. Discrete time logistic regression hazards models are used to analyse the risk of separation in the first eight years of marriage. Many socio-economic and family background factors are found to act through more intermediate determinants, such as age at marriage and the timing of childbearing, to affect the risk of separation. Previous cohabitation with another partner and premarital cohabitation are both associated with higher rates of marital breakdown. The effect of premarital cohabitation is attenuated but remains significant once the characteristics of cohabitors are controlled, and cannot be explained by the longer time spent in a partnership. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While it has been often suggested, most notably by Caldwell, that high fertility in developing countries is motivated by the positive economic returns that children contribute to their parents, empirical evidence to support the hypothesis is limited. This paper describes a method of measuring the economic returns from the average child over the entire parental life-cycle. The method is then applied to detailed household economic data from Côte d'Ivoire. The results indicate that parents give more to their children than they receive and that the economic returns from children are negative. Overall, we estimate that the average child provides an annual rate of return of roughly -- 8 per cent, Our results shed light on how the returns from childbearing vary according to the age of the parents at time of birth. The results also offer a potential economic explanation of why older couples are often first to adopt modern contraception. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Korea, total fertility declined from 6.0 in 1960 to 1.6 in 1990, in spite of a strong preference for male offspring. This paper addresses the notion that son preference hinders fertility decline, and examines the effects of patriarchal relations and modernization on fertility using the 1991 Korea National Fertility and Family Health Survey. It was found that women who have a son are less likely to have another child, and that women with a son who do progress to have another child, take longer to conceive the subsequent child. This pattern prevailed for women of parity one, two, and three, and became more pronounced with higher parity. A multivariate analysis showed that preference for male offspring, patriarchy, and modernization are all strong predictors of second, third, and fourth conceptions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is based on fieldwork done in 1992-93 in the Senegal River valley, a Sahelian region characterised by heavy out-migration for more than thirty years. As a result of this long history of human displacement, migration has now become a local institution of its own. More recently, the introduction of irrigation in an otherwise drought-prone area seems to have reduced the intensity of the phenomenon, but the momentum gathered by the local institution of migration means that the decrease of migration rates is likely to be very slow. The present analysis borrows some of its basic concepts from the new institutional economics and should therefore be seen as an illustration of how this perspective, quite effective in describing the complexity of social exchanges in rural societies, helps explain various determinants of migration. We will show, for example, that the two types of migration observed (short-term and long-term) respond similarly to common structural and family conditions, and appear to differ mainly when individual variables are taken into account. This feature underlines the crucial opposition between, on the one hand, individual determinants and, on the other, structural factors determined by economic or family characteristics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the last 30 years in Ghana, the proportion of households headed by women has increased and the composition of these households has shifted, with a growing percentage of households headed by the divorced and widowed. The paper assesses the implications of these trends for family welfare, and evaluates more broadly the current role of women in the economic maintenance of households with children, using data from the Ghana Living Standards Survey. The consumption levels of household members are highest in households in which women play a primary role in the provision of cash earnings either in partnership with their husbands, or as the primary cash providers. In all types of household, women work, on average, longer hours than men, but the differences between the sexes are greatest when men and women co-reside, and least when they do not. Access to resources from an economically committed male is found to be important to the welfare of female-headed households, which made up roughly 30 per cent of all households in Ghana in 1987/88. Because the majority of households in Ghana are maintained by the economic contribution of more than one member, headship often presents a misleading picture of the overall division of economic responsibilities within households. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper attempts to disentangle simultaneous demographic effects on divorce probabilities by means of age-period-cohort-type models. A multi-dimensional analysis of divorce probabilities in Finland between 1948 and 1984 is presented by period, marriage cohort, and duration, and for the year 1984 by age, age at marriage, and duration. Effects of order of marriage, number of children, and age of youngest child are also studied. Finland is one of the few countries in which such data are available from a population register. For the changes between 1948 and 1984, period effects turn out to be much more important for the increase in divorce than cohort effects. As regards period analysis for 1984, a quite surprising pattern appears: neither a specific duration of marriage (usually risk is highest at durations of between four and six years), nor a young age at marriage present the major risk factors, but young age itself. If this pattern were also to hold for other populations, it suggests the need for a major change in divorce analysis and registration of divorce data, giving less emphasis to duration or age at marriage, and more to age. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper examines marriage patterns in four Balkan countries during the course of the demographic transition. It is shown by analysis of the available data that cultural and institutional factors, such as family type, kinship structure or religious doctrines, alone, cannot explain adequately all the features of nuptiality in the region. Without denying the importance of the cultural-institutional' approach, it was found necessary to expand it by taking into account the distinctive historical and developmental context in a given country or region. It is argued that the relative importance of marriage postponement (and celibacy), birth control, and out-migration, as parts of a complex system of `adjustments' to sustained population growth, was determined by the rate of this growth, as well as by the pace of socio-economic development and a number of other factors (including institutional and cultural ones). The experience of the Balkan countries is explored with this assumption as a background. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Parity progression measures are uniquely suited to the study of fertility in China, because Chinese policies and programmes focus so closely on parity and birth order. In this paper we present period parity progression ratios for China and its urban and rural areas for the years 1955-81, using the birth history data from the one-per-thousand fertility survey of 1982. Our period parity progression ratios differ from those introduced by Henry in that they provide an overall level of fertility which may be compared with measures based on age-specific birth rates. We compare the two measures empirically for China, finding both similarities and divergences, and then analyse the relation between them. It is suggested that, where fertility is low and fluctuating, as in China, the parity-progression- based measures provide a substantially truer picture of fertility levels and trends than do age-based measures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper information about cohorts of young women in the National Longitudinal Survey of Work Experience is used to examine the extent to which women maintain a continuity of work attachment during their early years of childbearing, the years when traditionally they were most likely to withdraw from the work force. The results indicate that women who maintain closer ties to the work force immediately before and after their first birth are also more likely to be employed in 1978 - between five and ten years after their first birth - independently of intervening fertility events and other labour supply factors considered to be important predictors of work. The notion that work and fertility are increasingly becoming complementary activities for American women is supported by these data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper some findings of a family reconstitutions study of a group of high-upper-class American families are reported. The study extends over almost 2000 years, from the early colonial period to the Civil War. A substantive analysis of fertility patterns of a group of socially significant Philadelphia families provides interesting comparisons with the demographic experience of European social elites and raises additional questions regarding certain assumptions of classical demographic transition theory. The focus of the analysis is on fertility trends and evidence concerning the initiation of family limitation. If this group took a vanguard position by initiating the practice of family limitation in society as did other social elite groups, one might anticipate some evidence of this by the late eighteenth century.

In the new economic approach to fertility behaviour it is argued that as children become more expensive fewer will be born. The theory identifies the value of human time as the most important component of the price of children. Since the bearing and rearing of children is a time-intensive activity for the mother, her calculation of time is believed to be a crucial determinant of house-hold fertility. In the paper this proposition is tested by using survey data from Sierra Leone. Three alternative models are used to measure the value of women's time. in the first model, value of the mother's time is measured by her educational attainment, in the second model, the woman's current monthly income is assumed to indicate the value of her time. in the third model, value of time is treated as an endogenous variable determined by the household's socio-economic characteristics. The household's anticipated child mortality rate and its extended family characteristics are introduced as other important determinants of fertility in Sierra Leone. It is believed that with the inclusion of these latter variables the household model becomes better suited to explain fertility behaviour in a developing society. The salient statistical results indicate that the number of children born in a family is negatively influenced by the housewife's current income and positively related to the incidence of anticipated child mortality and the size of the extended family. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper shows that the Indiana Amish, a high-fertility Anabaptist population, regulate their marital fertility according to their family finances. We linked demographic data from the Indiana Amish Directory with personal property tax records at 5, 15 and 25 years after marriage and found fertility differences by occupation and wealth. Correlations between family size and wealth at the beginning, middle and end of childbearing years were positive. Wealthier women exhibited higher marital fertility, had longer first birth intervals, were older at the birth of their last child, and had larger families than poorer women. Over the past 30 years, marital fertility has remained constant among older women; but birth rates among younger women have been rising rapidly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a number of countries with national family planning programs demographic objectives have been set, designed to reduce crude birth or growth rates within designated intervals by specified amounts. Such objectives pose the problem of determining the annual numbers of acceptors of contraception required to achieve them. Component projection schemes specially elaborated to include assumptions about acceptance, effectiveness, and continuation of contraception are frequently used in this task. The assumptions about continuation turn out to be a crucial component of these calculations. For instance, doubling the expected length of use of methods is likely nearly to halve the number of acceptors inferred as necessary. It is the purpose of this paper to carry out a systematic comparison of the modified exponential and the Type III-exponential functions together with two new ones, the Type I-geometric and the modified Type I-geometric. Parameters are estimated by maximum likelihood. Comparisons are made on the basis of data from the IUD follow-up study with an effective observation period of eight years. This unusual length permits one to perform the experiment of pretending that observation is only one, two, or five years long and then to compare the results based on these varyingly abbreviated exposure spans with those based on the full observation period.

This paper examines the social status of women who married into the British peerage during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The majority of marriages by peers and their sons were outside the peerage. The occupations of the wives' fathers is used to indicate that the families from which wives were selected were largely those of rank and esteem in contemporary British Society. Marriages outside the peerage took place in a narrowly-defined band of privilege and social acceptability. The paper shows that the numbers of marriages into groups like the new industrial bourgeoisie were negligible, and had a marginal impact on the social exclusiveness of the peerage. The separate analysis of the marriages in each rank of the peerage, and of the marriages of heirs and younger sons, reveals that an ethic of endogamy prevailed within the peerage even for those marriages taking place in the twentieth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the relationships between certain socio-cultural and demographic or family size variables and attitudes toward family planning held by a sample of industrial workers in Ambarnath, a western Indian city. A comparison is made between these findings and those obtained from the nearby village of Badlapur. The major finding is that the variables which predict the presence or absence of favorable attitudes toward family planning in the village male sample are the most important ones in the male industrial sample. In both studies the education was the first ranking variable, followed by number of living sons. Caste, too, was significant in both studies. This evidence seems to indicate that the urban-industrial milieu's effect is almost non-existent in developing this attitude. Favorableness toward birth control seems to be part of a non-traditional value complex chiefly associated with educational attainment, not urban-industrial exposure or effects associated with this environment.

After the attainment of desired family size and before the onset of permanent sterility, couples face a risk period during which they have the problem of preventing additional pregnancies. Naturally these risk periods tend to be longest when the couple remain free of death, divorce, and sterilization. It is estimated that in the United States the risk periods of such couples are typically longer than to years. This paper has been concerned with the family limitation achieved under these circumstances. The analysis has proceeded in three steps: (1) review of reports by respondents about their own family limitation; (2) estimation of the average pregnancy rate during contraception; and (3) consideration of the degree to which these data are consistent with each other. Three out of four once-married wives aged 35–39 report successful family limitation. In about one out of six cases they report a sterilizing operation. The average pregnancy rate during contraception appears to exceed 0.025 pregnancies per month when the experience of each couple is weighted equally so as to obtain a simple mean of individual accident rates. There is no indication that the rate of accidental pregnancy declines with increasing marriage duration. However, the data, weighted heavily with short marriage durations, do not rule out the possibility that some improvement in contraceptive effectiveness takes place after attaining desired family size. These sets of data do not appear to support each other. Unless unrealistic assumptions are made, the reported incidence of sterilizing operations and the estimated mean pregnancy rate during contraception does not bear out the reported record of family limitation. It is scarcely credible that the great majority of couples practise nearly perfect contraception while the remaining minority both practise very inefficient contraception and account for most of the sterilizing operations. No simple or confident interpretation can be placed on these contradictory results. It can be shown empirically that United States couples are highly variable in their contraceptive effectiveness. Also, data exist to make it seem plausible that sterilizing operations are more frequent among accident-prone couples than others. Several reasons have been advanced for believing that respondents report optimistically about their family limitation. Possibly, too, the incidence of sterilizing operations is being understated. Finally, it is possible that some improvement in contraceptive effectiveness takes place after attainment of desired family size and that inconclusive data have merely failed to register this trend. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper contains an account of the development of the French system of family allowances and kindred benefits. In the first part of the study, the origin and growth of the system is traced, the provisions of the Code de la Famille of 1939 are described, and the modifications introduced by the Vichy Government are considered. Developments after the Liberation will be dealt with in a subsequent article. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article contains an analysis of part of the results of an inquiry into social mobility undertaken jointly by the Nuffield Research Unit of the London School of Economics and the Population Investigation Committee, in collaboration with the Ministry of Labour, based on nation-wide sample material collected by the Social Survey in England and Wales in 1949. Grateful acknowledgment is made to the Inter-Departmental Committee on Economic and Social Research for facilitating the collaboration with these government departments. In this paper, the relationship between fertility defined in terms of average family size of marriages of at least twenty years duration and social mobility is discussed. Two aspects of the latter phenomenon are discussed, namely, the position of sons on the social scale in relation to that of their fathers, and the change in the social status of a family in the period between the date of marriage and the date of the inquiry. The conclusions reached stand in apparent contradiction to R. A. Fisher's `Theory of Infertility Selection`. It is shown that socially promoted families tend on the one hand to carry with them the family-building habits of the class of their origin, and, on the other, to acquire to some extent the fertility characteristics of the class into which they move. The study of `personal' social mobility throws some light on the question of the choice of the time-basis of socioeconomic status allocation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper the author estimates the compensating variation of income which will be necessary to keep the standard of living of a family constant when a child is born to the family. Various methods of estimation are tried, and an attempt is made to calculate the cost of a child in 1948, after allowances have been made for services provided by the government. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the question of whether higher governmental support for families has a positive effect on fertility by encouraging parents to have more children. The analysis is based on data for 22 industrialized countries and covers the period 1970 to 1990. Data are analysed using a fixed-effect econometric model with the sum of age-specific fertility rates as the dependent variable. The results show that family allowances have a positive and significant effect on fertility, while maternity leave benefits have no significant effect. Increasing the value of family allowances by 25 per cent would result in an 0.6 per cent increase in fertility level in the short run. In the long run this effect would be of the order of 4 per cent, or about 0.07 children per woman on average. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the use of genealogical data for the study of the historical development of kinship networks in the Netherlands, 1830-1990. There are two main problems in using genealogies: the year of death is missing for a sizeable part of the research population; and the information available on all relevant branches is far from complete. A mixed estimation procedure was used to impute the missing years of death. Overcoming the second problem is more difficult; the only solution was to exclude individuals without children from the analysis. If these and other limitations of genealogies are not ignored and the effects of various types of under-registration are carefully assessed, genealogies can provide valuable information for our understanding of historical kinship patterns. The empirical results, using data on more than 160,000 persons, show that demographic changes in Dutch society during the last 160 years have significantly affected the kinship configuration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper alternative models for testing for child death clustering are explored, using data from Punjab. Significant evidence of clustering is found only amongst the lower socio-economic and educational groups. The majority of these families succeed in avoiding child-loss despite their social and economic disadvantages, while a few experience multiple child loss. As maternal education and socio-economic status rise, the negative deviance in factors related to child mortality appears to be removed. The extent of clustering is quite high in this population, indicating substantial potential for reducing child mortality by focusing services on high-risk households. Family building factors such as short birth intervals and high parity births do not raise child mortality when families are disaggregated by level of risk. They seem to be an effect rather than a cause of clustering of child deaths. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is well established that young people whose parents divorced or experienced marital breakdown during their childhood are likely to enter into first partnerships and into parenthood earlier than those whose parents remained married. In this paper, using data from the British National Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles Survey, we examine how far the timing of first coitus plays a role in the genesis of this demographic behaviour for children of divorced parents. Other factors, including the timing of menarche, attitudes to sexual activity, degree of parental strictness and religiosity, were also examined. In general, these factors had little explanatory power. The analysis showed that earlier sexual activity for men and women from disrupted families is an important proximate determinant of their earlier entry into partnership and parenthood, compared with those brought up with both natural parents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This analysis uses data from an intensive village study to investigate whether rising landlessness leads to increasing fragmentation and nucleation of families in rural Bangladesh. It was found that, even after rapid fertility decline, the elderly and women continue to rely extensively on family support. Although landlessness puts stress on intergenerational relations, a favourably low dependency ratio (elders to sons), brought about by the child-mortality decline of the 1950s and 1960s, has allowed the burden to be spread over larger numbers of sons than were previously available. A persistence of traditional living arrangements, in which sons form their own households in the homesteads of their fathers, also contributes to retarding the process of family disintegration that is likely to be caused when farm size decreases and the role of the farm economy in a traditional peasant society diminishes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the impact of family disruption in childhood on transitions made in young adult life. As a direct consequence of the rise in divorce, more and more children spend part of their lives in lone-parent families. For example, in 1971 lone-mother families resulting from marital breakdown represented four per cent of all British families with dependent children, compared with nine per cent in 1988. Where the lone parent remarries or begins to cohabit, children additionally spend part of their childhood in reconstituted families. The main objective of this study is to investigate whether the timing of transitions during young adult life varies for children from differing family settings. As young people move through their teens into their twenties, they frequently begin to make a number of key transitions: they finish full-time education, enter the labour market, leave home, establish independent households, find a partner, marry, and become parents. Three national cohort studies of children born in different decades have been carried out in Great Britain: 1946, 1958 and 1970. In each of these longitudinal studies a complete sample of one week's births was taken for the original study, in which the focus was mainly medical. The two more recent ones were primarily designed as studies of perinatal mortality; the oldest began as a study of maternity.

Data from the 1911 Census of England and Wales are examined for evidence of family limitation early in marriage. It is shown that a substantial number of couples used birth control for 'spacing' as welt as for 'stopping fertility. Moreover 'spacing' of births appears to have been more widespread in districts in which women's employment opportunities were relatively good. In general, the results obtained do not fit with the Princeton view of the European fertility transition with its stress on parity-specific family limitation spreading in response to improvements in contraceptive information and technology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A method is presented for analysing maternity history data to provide period estimates of parity progression ratios, birth intervals and related indices. This is applied to a sample of the marriage and maternity histories from the Census of England and Wales of 1971 and shows: (a) a general increase through the 1950s and into the 1960s in period estimates of marriage and parity progression ratios, especially in the progression from first to second birth; (b) a general acceleration of fertility with, again, the second birth interval becoming particularly short and compact; and (c) very steep declines in third and fourth birth progression ratios from the mid-1960s. Birth interval distributions altered during the period examined. Decomposition of a progression-based total fertility index shows change in the ratios for lower birth orders to have dominated the fertility upswing and declines in ratios for higher birth orders to have initiated the subsequent decline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Brass's method for estimating child mortality is based on an ingeniously simplified model. However, it frequently leads to values of q(x) that are not consistent with each other. This is most obvious for estimates of q(1). This paper examines the extent to which such inconsistencies are caused by simplifications in the model. Three assumptions are relaxed by adjusting for differences in infant mortality by birth order, taking account of annual fluctuations in mortality, and using a different age pattern of fertility for each cohort. These adjustments are applied to data from the 1974 Bangladesh Retrospective Survey of Fertility and Mortality and the 1975 Bangladesh Fertility Survey in which additional data from the Cholera Research Laboratory are used. The resulting estimates are more consistent both internally and with estimates from other surveys and by other procedures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on demographic changes in Papua New Guinea. Papua New Guinea is one of the many developing countries in which measures of fertility and mortality cannot be obtained from vital registration statistics because these are not sufficiently developed to provide data of acceptable scope and quality. In the two censuses of Papua New Guinea, carried out in mid-1966 and mid-1971, information was collected on children ever born and children surviving at the time of census. There are also some indications that the number of children ever born may have been under-reported by the older women. The average size of family for women aged 45-49 was lower than that of women aged 40-44. No definite figures are available for the population growth rate in Papua New Guinea before 1966. Even the intercensal rate of growth cannot be accepted at its face value because no information is available about the completeness of enumeration in 1966. The observations on the nature and quality of the basic data suggest that more realistic estimates of fertility and mortality would be obtained from figures relating to age groups 20-24 and 25-29.

The analysis of censuses for pre-industrial Europe has caused doubts about the supposed dominance of stem and joint family organization in earlier times. Using a hypothetical example of a nuclear family organization where extended composition is only found when widowed persons find shelter in the household of one of their children, we show that both the expected value and the variance of the estimated frequency of extended composition are high under demographic circumstances typical of pre-industrial Europe. This makes inferences about family organization based on data concerning family composition hazardous. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A study of an island-wide cross-section sample of 5,588 Taiwanese wives tinder 40 years of age shows that underlying preferences for number and for sex of children, as independently measured in newly developed scales, are both greatly at variance with single-valued statements and more predictive of fertility, fertility intentions and use of contraception. Underlying preferences indicate a persistent potential for large families and a clear preference for sons in a large part of the population studied. The modernization influences observed for underlying number preference are little noted for sex bias. The complicated relative impact of size and sex bias on fertility is assessed, with possible implications for future fertility changes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the trends of childbearing in England and Wales. Unfortunately, the analysis of trends and patterns of fertility of marriage cohorts in England and Wales is marred by the lack of data on the parity-distribution of women at risk. In this paper a computerized model simulating the fertility of a hypothetical marriage cohort in a closed population is described. The model is designed as a non-stationary Markov process. It was programmed for an IBM 360 in FORTRAN IV and applied to England and Wales fertility data of marriage cohorts of the years 1951 to 1970. For each of these cohorts, the programme generated birth-order probabilities, constructed family size frequency distributions, and computed mean length of intervals between marriage and successive births, parity progression ratios and mean family sizes of fertile women. The tables were computed for all women married once only under 45 years of age combined, and for quinquennial age-at-marriage groups up to age 40.

This article focuses on birth variations in populations which practice family planning. Birth control is obviously a prerequisite for any substantial variations in the timing of births, and the smaller the total number of children born in a cohort, the greater are the possibilities for accelerating or postponing the births of the children. The expression "family planning" is usually taken to be synonymous with limitation of the numbers of births, but may also be taken to include the timings of births. Although it is well known that variations in the timing of births for the cohorts presently in the childbearing ages may cause changes in the number of births which occur in a particular calendar year, it is still common, not only among laymen, to draw far-reaching conclusions with regard to reproduction etc., from fertility data covering a single calendar year or some few years only. The present paper aims at demonstrating, with illustrations for Sweden, that even quite small variations in the timing of births have a considerable effect on the number of births occurring in a particular calendar year and, furthermore, at discussing the opportunities for drawing conclusions about fertility and reproduction from period data.

This paper expands the conceptual apparatus of family life cycle analysis and illustrates its usefulness by applying it to a population. There is a normatively sanctioned life cycle that a female born into American society is expected to follow as she moves from birth to death: she is expected to survive through childhood, marry, bear and rear children, and survive jointly with her husband until her Children leave the home. Paul Glick, in several articles, has calculated mean ages at which these Various events are experienced. The life cycle analysis proposed here, however, focuses on the distribution of women according to type of life cycle experienced. Starting with a cohort of 100,000 females, six alternative life cycle possibilities are differentiated and the number who follow each of the types is calculated. Types are: (1) abbreviated, the female dies before she is exposed to the risk of marriage; (2) spinster, the woman is exposed to the risk of marriage but does not marry; (3) barren, the woman marries but remains childless; (4) dying mother, the women has children but dies before the last one leaves home; (5) widowed mother, the women has children and survives until they leave home, but her husband dies before that event; and (6) typical, the woman marries, has children, and survives jointly with her husband until the last one leaves home. Applying this approach to several cohorts of native-born Massachusetts women born at different times some striking changes appear. For examples the number of women from a birth cohort of 1000,000 who follow the typical life cycle increases from 21,000 for the cohort born in 1830 to 57,000 for the cohort born in 1920. The demographic, social and economic implications of a change of this magnitude are of considerable consequence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper takes a look at the belief that the number of couples currently desiring to limit family size is sufficiently large that the provision of supplies, services and education will be adequate to bring the birth rate down to acceptable levels within a reasonable time period. Current family planning programmes emphasize the provision of supplies, services and education. Attempts to change motivation through the use of monetary incentives have raised a very minor role so far. Implicit in this ordering of priorities must be the belief that the number of couples latently or actively desiring to limit family size is sufficiently large - or can be made sufficiently large through education and persuasion - to bring the birth rate down to acceptable levels reasonable soon. A debate is in progress about the extent to which the official family planning programmes in Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore and South Korea have been responsible for the fall in their rates. Monetary incentives were not widely or intensively used in these programmes. While there is no doubt that they speeded up the process of demographic transition, it is not clear how successful they would have been had they been initiated ten or twenty years earlier, before the socioeconomic situation became favorable.