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Among women divorcing before age 25, being childless increased the likelihood of remarriage; among women divorcing at 35 or older, having no children decreased it. For women divorcing at age 25 to 34, there was no effect. (Author)

In many demographic behaviors (e.g., those relating to marriage, contraception, migration, and health), people change among multiple statuses through time, sometimes leaving and then returning to the same status. Data on such behaviors are often collected in surveys as censored event histories. The multistate life table (MSLT) can be used to properly describe, in a single analysis, these complex transitions among multiple states measured in such data, but MSLT is rarely applied in the demographic literature because practical guidance is lacking on how to compute MSLTs with such data. We provide methods for computing MSLT quantities using censored event-history data: namely, transition intensities and probabilities, "state occupancy" probabilities and standard errors, average time spent in specified states, and average number of visits to specified states. Applying these methods to contraceptive use, we find high levels of switching back and forth, particularly between barrier methods and non-use, resulting in high rates of unintended pregnancy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Data on the last closed and open birth intervals have been used to ascertain the current potential of childbearing for women in terms of estimating fecundity and secondary sterility by age, residence, and educational subgroup. Under the assumption that after a specific period from the last birth a certain proportion of women become secondarily sterile, we propose and apply an inflated model of open birth interval to obtain the proportion of women who are secondarily sterile. The data used for the analysis are extracted from the Egyptian Fertility Survey conducted in 1980. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The proportional hazards models of birth intervals based on the data from the 1976 Jordan Fertility Survey indicate that in Jordan the influence of infant death on subsequent fertility is not uniform among all population subgroups. Child survival seems to have only minimal influence on fertility among less educated women and women at low birth orders. In contrast, the probability of a subsequent birth increases significantly following an infant death among women in the high education class and among women in the high birth order group. The impact of infant death is similar among rural and urban women. Further analysis shows that the observed differences in the birth intervals of women with and without infant death experience cannot be attributed to the fecundity differentials of these two groups of women. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Breastfeeding beyond the resumption of mother's menstruation plays a significant role in the proximate determinants of fertility. Breastfeeding and postpartum amenorrhoea data collected from retrospective surveys usually exhibit digit preferences. Here, these heaping errors were smoothed by B‐spline and used in multivariate models of risk of conception to investigate the contraceptive effect of breastfeeding. The data used come from a 1987 Indian survey. Results show that lactation, after mother's menses resume, reduces the risk of conception. Heaping in breastfeeding data attenuates this relationship. When adjustment is made, breastfeeding reduced the rate of conception by 47 per cent; the reduction, with adjusted data, was 63 per cent. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A proportional hazards regression model was applied to data on women aged 45–49 from the Egyptian Fertility Survey, to assess the effects of women's education, residence, and marital experience on their age at the birth of their last child. When age at marriage and parity were controlled, well-educated urban women tended to stop reproducing earlier than less educated rural women. Compared to intact first marriages, marital dissolution (divorce, widowhood, or separation) with remarriage tended to prolong the age at last birth, while failure to remarry tended to hasten it. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]