A theoretical analysis of antecedents of young couples’ fertility decisions and outcomes

Longitudinal survey data from 509 couples who at Time 1 interview had recently married or had their first child did not support the hypothesis that demographic factors influence fertility intentions, decisions, and outcomes only indirectly through their effects on attitudes and motivations. Husbands’ and wives’ attitudes exerted reciprocal influence on one another. However, while husbands’ sex-role traditionalism and motivation for parenthood strongly influenced wives’ traditionalism and motivation in the case of recently married couples, this pattern was reversed for riew parents. Birth control use was directly affected by wives’ fertility intentions, but not by husbands’ intentions. Difficulties in examining couple interaction variables such as relative power and the possible limitations of fitting these data to a complex theoretical model using LISREL are discussed.     

Fertility desires and fertility: Hers,his, and theirs

The relationship between desired and achieved fertility may be misspecified by excluding husbands' fertility desires or by confounding effects of shared desires with the resolution of conflicting desires. Using couple data from the classic Princeton Fertility Surveys, we find relatively large husband effects on fertility outcomes as well as unique effects of spousal disagreement. Wives and husbands were equally likely to achieve fertility desires, and disagreeing couples experienced fertility rates midway between couples who wanted the same smaller or larger number of children. These conditions do not hold, however, when we include willingness to delay births for economic mobility as part of the measure of fertility desires. Among couples who both wanted a third child, only husbands' willingness to delay births had significant negative effects on birth rates.     

Husbands,wives, sons,and daughters: Fertility preferences and the demand for contraception in Ethiopia

Ethiopia, with nearly 65 millionpeople, is the second most populous country in sub-Saharan Africa. Fertility levels are among the highest in the world. Using the matched wife-husband sample from the 1990 National Family and Fertility Survey of Ethiopia we investigate the fertility desires of wives and husbands and the degree to which they are similar, including whether a preference for sons exists. We model the determinants of the desire to limit or space births, and estimate unmet need. Results indicate high levels of concurrence among husbands and wives on reproductive preferences. Where differences exist, husbands are more pronatalist than their wives. Both husbands and wives prefer to have sons and daughters, but more sons overall. Approximately 22% of wives and husbands desire to limit or space births but do not use contraception. More than half of wives and husbands with an unmet need for limiting are paired with a partner who has no such need. Three implications follow from these results: (1) differences in wives' and husbands' son and daughter preferences may help to explain discordant views among couples when it comes to the desire to limit or space births; (2) husbands' overall contribution to wives' unmet need can be substantial in African societies in the early stages of fertility transition; and (3) wives' preferences regarding children and contraception can result in unmet need on the part of husbands, even in highly gender-stratified societies where men are more pronatalist.     

Lost jobs, broken marriages

This paper examines the impact of both husbands’ and wives’ job displacement on the risk that the marriage ends in divorce. Using Swedish-linked employee–employer data, all married couples in which one of the spouses lost his or her job because of an establishment closure in 1987 or 1988 and a comparison sample were identified. Over a 12-year period, the excess risk of divorce among couples’ in which the husband was displaced was 13% and statistically significant. The estimated impact of wives’ job displacements was of almost the same size, but not statistically significant.     

Caregiver stressors and depressive symptoms among older husbands and wives in the United States

Framed by Pearlin’s Stress Process Model, this study prospectively examines the effects of primary stress factors reflecting the duration, amount, and type of care on the depressive symptoms of spousal caregivers over a2-year period, and whether the effects of stressors differ between husbands and wives. Data are from the 2004 and 2006 waves of the Health and Retirement Study and we included community-dwelling respondents providing activities of daily life (ADL) and/or instrumental activities of daily life (IADL) help to their spouses/partners (N = 774). Results from multivariate regression models indicate that none of the primary stressors were associated with depressive symptoms. However, wives providing only personal care had significantly more depressive symptoms than wives providing only instrumental care, while husbands providing different types of care showed no such differences. To illuminate strategies for reducing the higher distress experienced by wife caregivers engaged in personal care assistance, further studies are needed incorporating couples’ relational dynamics and gendered experiences in personal care.     

Individual and couple intentions for more children: A research note

The question, “Do you and your husband intend to have a (another) child?” has become standard on fertility surveys. It is almost always asked of the wife, but is treated as the couple’s joint intention. How reasonable is such an assumption? Do husbands’ and wives’ reports of couple intent correspond closely? Do spouses know the fertility wishes of their partners? Do they take these wishes into account when reporting couple intent? Analysis of a sample of fecund, white, urban U.S. couples shows each question answered affirmatively. Reports from either spouse appear to be good, although admittedly imperfect, indicators of couple intent.     

Linked lives,dependent demise? Survival analysis of husbands and wives

Past research has found that married individuals have substantially lower risks of mortality than their single counterparts. This paper examines how household characteristics affect spouses’ risks of mortality. A paired hazard rate model is estimated and tests are made to ascertain whether the estimated coefficients associated with risk factors differ between husbands’ and wives’ equations. Cigarette smoking, risk-avoidance behavior, poverty, and children are found to affect wives’ and husbands’ mortality in similar ways. Divorce, which can be interpreted as the termination of this shared household environment, is found to affect spouses differently.     

Job characteristics of spouses and their work shifts

This study builds on an earlier finding from the May 1980 Current Population Survey that one-third of full-time dual-earner couples with children in the United States include at least one spouse who works other than a regular day shift. Using the same data source, the relevance of husbands’ and wives’ job characteristics (occupation and industry) on their shift work status are considered, and the nature of the association between husbands’ and wives’ work shifts is explored. Four alternative models are initially posed and tested with log-linear analysis; these models vary in the extent to which a spouse’s shift work status is contingent upon the job characteristics of a husband or wife. None of these models fit the data. A modification of the simplest of the four models (using forward selection) is the best fitting model. It is not symmetrical: the wife’s shift is contingent upon both her occupation and industry and that of her husband, but the husband’s shift is contingent only upon his occupation and industry. There is a relationship between husband’s and wife’s shift, the direction of which depends upon the occupations of both spouses. This study demonstrates the importance of taking a “couple” perspective on shift work among married persons, and the need for models that include interaction effects.     

Individual and couple utility of children

Models specifying the utility of another child as either a couple or an individual experience and incorporating variations in the measurement properties of responses about child utility and expectations are estimated with data from the U.S. Value of Children survey. Full information, maximum likelihood analyses indicate that child utility is an individual experience of wives and husbands rather than a shared couple experience. That is, differences in the measurement properties of wives’ and husbands’ responses do not account entirely for the less than perfect correlations between their responses. These findings demonstrate the importance of estimating errors in measurement in the analysis of wives’ and husbands’ responses about the utility of children, and they challenge the assumption that marital partners share the utility of children.     

Motivational and nonmotivational determinants of child-number desires

The number of children desired by individuals—often referred to as family size desires or preferences—is a central construct in much research designed to understand and predict fertility. It is often used as a proxy for the construct of childbearing motivation. This paper presents a theoretical framework that organizes and elucidates the relationship between these two constructs. That relationship is examined using a reliable, valid measure of childbearing motivation and data from 195 husbands and 196 wives with no children and 196 husbands and 196 wives with one child. The results indicate that childbearing motivation has a complex relationship with child-number desires, characterized by curvilinearity and a failure to distinguish among those desiring more than two children. We discuss the implications of this pattern.     

The influence of wives’ and husbands’ fertility preferences on progression to a third birth in Nepal, 1997–2009

As couples across the globe increasingly exercise conscious control over their reproduction, both spouses’ family-size preferences have the opportunity to influence their fertility. Using couple-level measures of rural Nepalese spouses’ family-size preferences and more than a decade of monthly panel data collected subsequently on fertility outcomes, we investigate how both spouses’ preferences influence progression to a third birth in a country where the widely professed ideal family size is two children. Contrary to expectations based on women's relative disadvantage, we find that it is wives’ preferences that drive couples’ progression to a third birth. We find also that the influence of wives’ preferences is not explained by contraceptive use but that this influence is moderated by couple communication about family planning. Wives’ preferences drive progression to a third birth among couples who had discussed how many children to have.     

Dual-earner migration. Earnings gains, employment and self-selection

This paper examines how spouses in dual-earner couples weigh each partner’s expected wage growth in the decision to migrate. Previous research suggests that husbands’ job prospects dominate the migration choice irrespective of their relative earnings potential. Based on British panel data, this paper employs an endogenous switching model and estimates wage differentials of migrating vs. staying for husbands and wives corrected for double selectivity of migration and employment. Dual-earner couples attach a positive weight to each partner’s expected wage gains when deciding to migrate. Moreover, migrant wives’ employment decreases temporarily, and there are significant selection effects in migration and employment amongst non-migrants.     

What Will You Do If I Say ‘I Do’?: The Effect of the Sex Ratio on Time Use within Taiwanese Married Couples

This paper uses the natural experiment of a large imbalance between men and women of marriageable age in Taiwan in the 1960s to test the hypothesis that higher sex ratios lead to husbands (wives) having a lower (higher) share of couple’s time in leisure and higher (lower) share of the couple’s total work time (employment, commuting, and housework). The sample includes 18,134 Taiwanese couples’ time diaries from 1987, 1990, and 1994. The OLS analysis finds evidence of the predicted effects of the county-level sex ratio on husbands’ and wives’ share of leisure and total work time. The county-level sex ratio’s impact on college-educated husbands’ time use is shown to be larger than the impact on non-college-educated husbands’ time use. A two-stage least square analysis controlling for possible endogeneity of county of residence returns similar findings.     

Family planning communication between spouses in Sri Lanka

Drawing on data from a national follow-up survey of 2310 currently married women aged 15-49 conducted in Sri Lanka in 1985, this study examines patterns of family planning communication between spouses, social and economic factors related to those patterns, and the consistency between spouses in their responses to questions about family planning attitudes and practice. The results of the analysis indicate a high degree of family planning communication between spouses in Sri Lanka. The communication, however, varied according to couples' number of living children and to wives' age, education, place of residence, religion, and work status. Multivariate logistic regression generally confirms that older women, those with little or no education, those living on tea estates, and Muslims were less likely to communicate with their husbands on family planning matters than were women in other age, education, residence, and religion categories. These findings suggest the existence of social and cultural obstacles to communication between spouses about family planning matters in Sri Lanka. Among the 577 pairs of spouses whose answers were compared for consistency, a large proportion of wives reported hearing about male contraceptive methods directly from their husbands, and a large proportion of husbands reported hearing about female methods from their wives. These findings are a reminder that both spouses are potentially important sources of information about contraception.     

Mobility,Non-Familial Activity,and Fertility

In this analysis of fertility data from a sample of non-Catholic faculty couples in an American university, temporal patterns and variations in education, employment, marriage, and parenthood of the husbands and wives are discussed in reference to (1) the social mobility-fertility hypothesis and (2) a non-familial activity-fertility hypothesis.The couples are divided into four groups on the basis of family size and mobility status: (1) mobile-small, (2) non-mobile-small, (3) mobile-large, and (4) non-mobile-large. Whatever their mobility status, the four groups of husbands successfully completed requirements for the doctoral degree at about the same age and became established at about the same time in life and within the profession. Whatever their husbands' social origins, the wives also differ little with respect to educational attainment and in their work experiences in prematrimonial days. However, a different pattern is found in the work experiences of the wives since marriage. Those with two children are more likely to be employed after marriage and parenthood.On the other hand, a good many more wives with four or more children not only never worked before marriage but also remained outside the labor force after marriage (in the earlier years of marriage as well as after the tenth anniversary). The present data thus seem to support an analytically useful distinction between the "working wives" and the "working mothers."     

How is My Partner Feeling in Different Daily-Life Settings? Accuracy of Spouses' Judgements about Their Partner's Feelings at Work and at Home

How accurately do spouses know their partner's feelings when the partneris not physically present, but in a specific setting (at work, or at home)?This question addresses a special kind of empathic inference that relies mainly on content knowledge and projection rather than perception. We answered this question using a computer assisted diary approach. A total of 190 husbands and wives outof 95 couples simultaneously recorded how they were feeling and what they thought their partner was feeling, six times each day during an ordinary week. They also recorded where they were, who they were with, and where they thought their partner was. This enabled us to assess measures of accuracy and assumed similarity under natural conditions in spouses' daily lives. Results showed that the spouses' judgements of the absent partner's feelings relied on their own feelings (assumed similarity). Despite this they were often quite accurate, even when assumed similarity was controlled. In general, our findings indicate that spouses have a basic knowledge about their partner's feelings when they are apart. However, the specific situation, the items being judged, and the gender of the spouses also need to be taken into account.     

The marital satisfaction of differently aged couples

We investigate how the marital age gap affects the evolution of marital satisfaction over the duration of marriage using household panel data from Australia. We find that men tend to be more satisfied with younger wives and less satisfied with older wives. Interestingly, women likewise tend to be more satisfied with younger husbands and less satisfied with older husbands. Marital satisfaction declines with marital duration for both men and women in differently aged couples relative to those in similarly aged couples. These relative declines erase the initial higher levels of marital satisfaction experienced by men married to younger wives and women married to younger husbands within 6 to 10 years of marriage. A possible mechanism is that differently aged couples are less resilient to negative shocks compared to similarly aged couples, which we find some supportive evidence for.     

Spousal Support of Older Women with Osteoporotic Pain: Congruity of Perceptions

ABSTRACT

Thirty-four couples were interviewed to assess the congruity of husbands' and wives' perceptions of the wives' osteoporotic pain and the exchange of instrumental support within the marital relationship. Moderate correlations were found between the husbands' and wives' ratings of two specific dimensions of the wives' pain experience: interference with daily life and pain severity. Wives who perceived their pain as more severe but as having a lesser impact on their personal lives provided the most frequent help to their husbands. The wives' pain perceptions were not predictive of the amount of assistance they perceived receiving from their spouses. Husbands' perceptions of their wives' pain experience were not predictive of the frequency of instrumental support they either received from or gave to their wives.     

Work, income, the economy, and married fathers as child-care providers

Previous research on fathers as child-care providers indicates a need to study the father’s role in child care in the context of different economic cycles. Using data from the 1988, 1991, and 1993 panels of the Survey of Income and Program Participation, we examine whether father’ availability and the couple’s economic resources are differentially related to child care by fathers over time. We focus on the differences between 1991—a recession year—and 1988 and 1993—two nonrecession years. Increased availability of fathers is significantly related to higher levels of fathers’ participation in child care in all three years. Relative economic resources between husbands and wives help explain care by fathers only during the recession year, whereas family income is important only in the nonrecession years. These results suggest that in the future, researchers should acknowledge fluctuations in the economy when studying husbands’ participation in traditional female tasks, as macroeconomic shifts appear to impact the likelihood of married fathers caring for their preschoolers during mothers’ working hours.     

Men’s Migration and Women’s Fertility in Rural Mozambique

Labor migration profoundly affects households throughout rural Africa. This study looks at how men’s labor migration influences marital fertility in a context where such migration has been massive while its economic returns are increasingly uncertain. Using data from a survey of married women in southern Mozambique, we start with an event-history analysis of birth rates among women married to migrants and those married to nonmigrants. The model detects a lower birth rate among migrants’ wives, which tends to be partially compensated for by an increased birth rate upon cessation of migration. An analysis of women’s lifetime fertility shows that it decreases as the time spent in migration by their husbands accrues. When we compare reproductive intentions stated by respondents with migrant and nonmigrant husbands, we find that migrants’ wives are more likely to want another child regardless of the number of living children, but the difference is significant only for women who see migration as economically benefiting their households. Yet, such women are also significantly more likely to use modern contraception than other women. We interpret these results in light of the debate on enhancing versus disrupting effects of labor migration on families and households in contemporary developing settings.