Cohort nuptiality in England and Wales

Summary A computerized nuptiality system, called GENMAR, has been developed to investigate trends in cohort nuptiality in England and Wales. This system has five main programmes dealing with first marriage, the effects of changes in mortality on nuptiality measures, divorce, re-marriage, and marital status distribution. This paper summarizes the results of the application of the first programme to England and Wales data on first marriages of persons who were born in every single year since 1900. GENMAR-1 generated for each of these cohorts a 'complete' gross nuptiality table. The analysis shows that there have been substantial increases in the intensity of first marriage at young ages, a downward shift in the modal age at marriage, and a significant rise in the proportion ever married among women. The cohort nuptiality tables also show that the change in the nuptiality of women was due to changes in both the tempo and level of nuptiality, whereas the change for men was mainly the effect of shifts in the temporal pattern of nuptiality. There are, however, signs of a slow down of marriage among the cohorts born since the early 1950's.     

Fertility decline in Scotland, England and Wales, and Ireland: comparisons from the 1911 census of fertility

Data on family size by year of marriage, age at marriage, and duration of marriage, from the 1911 Fertility Census, are compared between Scotland, England and Wales, Irish county boroughs, and the rest of Ireland. While means show significant inter-country differences, from the 1880s marked similarities are found across all the countries in the pattern of fertility decline, strongly suggesting significant fertility limitation in rural Ireland well before 1911. Noting the implications for the use of rural Ireland as a natural fertility population, the data are instead compared with the Coale-Trussell and Hinde-Woods schedules. The former provides more plausible results, which imply strong period rather than cohort effects in the fertility decline. Except in rural Ireland, little evidence is found for significant fertility limitation early in marriage among younger marrying couples, but many older marrying couples appear to have stopped childbearing at very low parities from an early date.     

A demographic explanation for the recent rise in European fertility

Between 1998 and 2008 European countries experienced the first continent-wide increase in the period total fertility rate (TFR) since the 1960s. After discussing period and cohort influences on fertility trends, we examine the role of tempo distortions of period fertility and different methods for removing them. We highlight the usefulness of a new indicator: the tempo- and parity-adjusted total fertility rate (TFRp*). This variant of the adjusted total fertility rate proposed by Bongaarts and Feeney also controls for the parity composition of the female population and provides more stable values than the indicators proposed in the past. Finally, we estimate levels and trends in tempo and parity distribution distortions in selected countries in Europe. Our analysis of period and cohort fertility indicators in the Czech Republic, Netherlands, Spain, and Sweden shows that the new adjusted measure gives a remarkable fit with the completed fertility of women in prime childbearing years in a given period, which suggests that it provides an accurate adjustment for tempo and parity composition distortions. Using an expanded dataset for ten countries, we demonstrate that adjusted fertility as measured by TFRp* remained nearly stable since the late 1990s. This finding implies that the recent upturns in the period TFR in Europe are largely explained by a decline in the pace of fertility postponement. Other tempo-adjusted fertility indicators have not indicated such a large role for the diminishing tempo effect in these TFR upturns. As countries proceed through their postponement transitions, tempo effects will decline further and eventually disappear, thus putting continued upward pressure on period fertility. However, such an upward trend may be obscured for a few years by the effects of economic recession.     

Timing effects and the interpretation of period fertility

Low fertility levels and later childbearing in many developed countries have reinvigorated the debate between period and cohort perspectives on fertility and on the meaningfulness of the period total fertility rate (TFR). Here, fertility-timing effects are defined as level changes in period fertility that do not reflect level changes in the completed fertility of cohorts. That definition leads to the average cohort fertility (ACF) as a measure of period fertility adjusted for timing effects. In an influential paper, Bongaarts and Feeney (1998) presented an alternative approach and a different measure, TFR*, to adjust for timing effects. Here, the two measures are compared. In the context of model populations, the ACF performs well, reflecting an average of the fertility of the active cohorts. The Bongaarts-Feeney TFR*, however, is frequently unreliable and can be erratic when there are cycles in period timing. When applied to twentieth-century U.S. experience, the TFR* behaves like a period measure and yields adjustments that are often wide of the mark. The ACF shows the stability associated with cohort measures and quantifies the substantial impact that timing effects had during the "birth dearth" of the 1970s. The period TFR reached a low of 1.74 in 1976, but the ACF never went below 2.06 during the 1970s.     

Approaches to the Fertility Transition in Victorian England

The secular decline of marital fertility which took place in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century England and Wales is considered by using a number of approaches. Among the theoretical approaches considered are those of transition models, and social diffusion. The former overemphasises the role of industrialization and urbanization; the latter is inappropriate when dealing with the development of a small-family ideal in Victorian society. Explanations of fertility decline using ecological and time-series analysis are considered. The registration districts of England and Wales provide the framework for analyses of spatial variations in marital fertility and its correlates in 1861, 1891 and 1911. A time-series analysis attempts to establish the sequential nature of social, economic and demographic changes during the sixty years preceding the First World War. The following points are emphasised in conclusion. The Victorian fertility transition was not directly related to the development of an urban-industrial society, the social diffusion of family ideals or the use of appliance methods of contraception. But its immediate cause was probably linked to the substantial increase in family planning literature available from the 1870s, and the challenge that this posed to the tradition of unlimited marital fertility. This critical change in social attitudes to family planning was facilitated both by developments in mass education and, ultimately by the decline of infant mortality.     

Period Parity Progression Ratios and Birth Intervals in England and Wales, 1941–1971: A Synthetic Life Table Analysis

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.     

Multivariate analysis of parity progression—based measures of the total fertility rate and its components

This article describes a methodology for applying a discrete-time survival model—the complementary log-log model—to estimate effects of socioeconomic variables on (1) the total fertility rate and its components and (2) trends in the total fertility rate and its components. For the methodology to be applicable, the total fertility rate (TFR) must be calculated from parity progression ratios (PPRs). The components of the TFR are PPRs, the total marital fertility rate (TMFR), and the TFR itself as measures of the quantum of fertility, and mean and median ages at first marriage and mean and median closed birth intervals by birth order as measures of the tempo or timing of fertility. The focus is on effects of predictor variables on these measures rather than on coefficients, which are often difficult to interpret in the complex models that are considered. The methodology is applicable to both period and cohort data. It is illustrated by application to data from the 1993, 1998, and 2003 Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) in the Philippines.     

Age at marriage and timing of the first birth

Summary An attempt has been made to measure the effect of age at marriage of brides on the timing of the first birth. In Australian vital statistics, first nuptial confinements have been tabulated by age of mothers and by single years of marriage duration in single months for the first two years and by single years for all other durations since 1916. A simple technique has been used to link such data with marriage cohorts. The study briefly reviews the prevailing patterns of the timing of first births by mothers' age at marriage and changes in this pattern since the marriages of the 1925/9 period. The analysis shows that after a period of relative stability of family formation patterns in the 1950s and early 1960s, women married in the late 1960s started postponing the first birth beyond the first two years of marriage. It is suggested that a fraction of the decline in total births recorded in Australia since 1972 can be attributed to the postponement of first nuptial confinements by women married in the late 1960s and early 1970s.     

The End of the Fertility Transition in the Developed World

By the late 1990s the average period total fertility rate in the developed world had declined to 1.6, a level substantially lower than projected in the 1970s and 1980s. This article examines recent trends and patterns in fertility in the developed world with particular emphasis on the effects and implications of changes in the timing of childbearing. The main objective is to demonstrate that while fertility in these countries is indeed low, women's childbearing levels are not as low as period measures such as the total fertility rate suggest. To obtain a full understanding of the various dimensions of fertility change. several indicators are examined, including period and cohort fertility by birth order and childbearing preferences. An analysis of these indicators demonstrates that period fertility measures in many developed countries are temporarily depressed by a rise in the mean age at childbearing. The distortion of the TFR is as great as 0.4 births per woman in Italy and Spain. These effects have been present in many developed countries since the 1970s and could continue for years into the future. But tempo effects are temporary, and once the postponement of childbearing ends—as it eventually must—the corresponding fertility‐depressing effect stops, thus putting upward pressure on period fertility. Countries with very low fertility and substantial tempo effects may well experience rises in fertility in the near future if the timing of childbearing stabilizes. Even if this happens, however, it seems unlikely that fertility will rebound to the replacement level.     

On the pattern of cohort fertility

Abstract An examination of the patterns of cohort fertility rates in a number of populations revealed the existence of a common pattern showing how mean family sizes of the different age-at-marriage groups of a given marriage cohort are built up over the reproductive span. Standard schedules of fertility patterns are generated by the use of the Gompertz function which defines the distribution of cumulative fertility rates of a given marriage cohort by marriage duration by means of only three parameters. The generated system is tested with the historical series for England and Wales and Sweden and is found adequate to describe widely different childbearing patterns. Some of the demographic implications of the existence of common fertility patterns are examined and the usefulness of the generated system in projecting future fertility trends is briefly discussed.     

On the tempo of childbearing in England and Wales

Abstract The paper describes a computerized model developed to simulate the fertility of a hypothetical marriage cohort in a closed population. The model was applied to England and Wales fertility data of marriage cohorts of the years 1951 to 1970. For each of these cohorts, the computer was programmed to construct five series of tables showing birth-order probabilities, family size frequency distribution, mean length of intervals between marriage and successive births, parity progression ratios and mean family sizes of fertile women. The results showed that the fertility of the cohorts of women who married between the middle 1950s and the early 1960s was character ized by a declining trend in the frequency of childlessness and by a dramatic increase in the proportion of marriages with two or more children. Since 1964 or so, there has been a downward trend in duration-specific birth-order probabilities. The analysis suggests that the recent drop in fertility may well prove to be the effect of an upward shift in the timing of births as well as a fall in completed fertility.     

Tempo and the TFR

Tempo effects in period fertility indicators are widely regarded as a source of bias or distortion. But is this always the case? Whether tempo change results in bias depends, in the view advanced here, on the measure used, the meaning of bias/distortion, and the objective of analysis. Two ways of construing bias in period measures are suggested, and their relevance is discussed in the context of five broad purposes for measuring period fertility: describing and explaining fertility time trends, anticipating future prospects, providing input parameters for formal models, and communicating with nonspecialist audiences. Genuine timing effects are not biasing when period fertility is the explanandum but are distorting when the aim is to estimate cohort fertility. Alternatives to tempo adjustment are available that are a more defensible solution to the issue of timing change. Tempo adjustment could be more fruitfully considered a form of modeling rather than empirical measurement. The measurement of period fertility could be improved by relying more on a statistical approach and less on indicators based on stable assumptions. Future progress will depend on integrating research on measurement with substantive investigation.     

Birth delays skew developing world's fertility figures

This article explains that birth delays skew developing world's fertility figures. When successive groups of women who have delayed childbearing start having children, the rapid fertility decline stalls. Such change in the timing of childbearing skews the total fertility rate (TFR). Analysis of the tempo component of TFR trends in Taiwan suggests that tempo effects reduced its TFR by about 10% in the late 1970s and early 1990s and by about 19% in the late 1980s. In Colombia, on the basis of increasing mean maternal age at childbirth between the 1970s and the late 1980s, tempo distortions of the TFR during the most of the 1980s seem likely. Moreover, many developing countries are now experiencing rapid fertility declines that are in part attributable to tempo changes. These changes have accelerated past fertility transitions, but they also make these countries vulnerable to future stalls in fertility when the delays in childbearing end. Since fertility reductions caused by tempo effects lead to real declines in birth rates and hence in population growth, countries that wish to reduce birth rates can take actions that encourage women to delay marriage and the onset of childbearing.     

The marriage boom and marriage bust in the United States: An age–period–cohort analysis

In the 1950s and 1960s there was an unprecedented marriage boom in the United States. This was followed in the 1970s by a marriage bust. Some argue that both phenomena are cohort effects, while others argue that they are period effects. The study reported here tested the major period and cohort theories of the marriage boom and bust, by estimating an age–period–cohort model of first marriage for the years 1925–79 using census microdata. The results of the analysis indicate that the marriage boom was mostly a period effect, although there were also cohort influences. More specifically, the hypothesis that the marriage boom was mostly a response to rising wages is shown to be consistent with the data. However, much of the marriage bust can be accounted for by unidentified cohort influences, at least until 1980.     

Twentieth-century cohort marriage and divorce in England and Wales

Summary Marital status life tables, which follow a real or synthetic birth cohort through life and the marital statuses of 'never married', 'presently married', 'widowed', and 'divorced', reflect observed marriage, divorce and mortality behaviour and provide a detailed record of a cohort's experience. The present paper analyses such tables for cohorts of men and women born in England and Wales between 1900 and 1945. The results show that the later cohorts deviate substantially from the 'European pattern' of late marriage and high proportions never marrying, and that a dramatic rise in divorce has taken place, so that among the later cohorts one marriage out of four ends in divorce.     

Changing patterns of first marriage in the United States

In this paper, we have traced changes in the patterns of first marriage in the United States for cohorts of men and women born in 1880 through 1965 and for the years from 1900 through 1983. There were striking changes in marriage rates associated with each of the world wars and with the depression of the 1930s. In addition to these short-term fluctuations, a long-term shift in marriage rates is observed over the period from after World War II until about 1970. By the end of the 1970s, however, marriage rates had returned to levels similar to those observed before the war. The basic similarity in the timing of changes in marriage rates across age levels and for both men and women, blacks and whites, is a striking characteristic of these marriage curves. There are also, however, important differences among these groups with respect to the magnitude and slopes of the shifts. The postwar marriage boom was strongest among the young (those under age 24) and among whites. Similarly, the declines in marriage rates observed in the 1970s were greatest among the young. The marriage rates for teenagers display trends that diverge in many respects from those of older persons. For example, the marriage rates of male teenagers did not show the "peaks" and "valley" associated with World War II for older age groups and female teenagers. Moreover, there is little sign of the postwar marriage boom among black teenagers of either sex. Indeed, the marriage rates of black teenagers began to decline soon after the war, and by the 1970s the marriage rates of both male and female black teenagers had fallen below those of their white counterparts, reversing the pattern that had existed through the first half of this century. During the twenty-five or so years of the postwar marriage boom, which we believe can be characterized best as a period phenomenon, there were trends-eddies within the mainstream-which are probably most easily interpreted as the consequence of a cohort effect.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 400 WORDS)     

Duration of Marriage,Fertility and Women's Employment Opportunities in England and Wales in 1911

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 well 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.     

Men’s career development and marriage timing during a period of rising inequality

Based on data from 1979–1990 NLSY interviews, we investigate the implications of rising economic inequality for young men’s marriage timing. Our approach is to relate marriage formation to the ease or difficulty of the career-entry process and to show that large race/schooling differences in career development lead to substantial variations in marriage timing. We develop measures of current career “maturity” and of long-term labor-market position. Employing discrete-time event-history methods, we show that these variables have a substantial impact on marriage formation for both blacks and whites. Applying our regression results to models based on observed race/schooling patterns of career development, we then estimate cumulative proportions ever married in a difficult versus an easy career-entry process. We find major differences in the pace of marriage formation, depending on the difficulty of the career transition. We also find considerable differences in these marriage timing patterns across race/schooling groups corresponding to the large observed differences in the speed and difficulty of career transitions between and within these groups     

The temporal relationship of marriage,conception, and birth in Massachusetts

An investigation into the timing of first births in relationship to the date of marriage in Massachusetts confirmed the finding of previous national and local birth timing studies that first births likely to have been conceived before the marriage of their parents constitute a substantial proportion of all first births. The differential frequency of premaritally conceived births among various subgroups appeared to account for the variation noted in the overall timing patterns of first births after marriage. Data were gathered through linkage of certificates of birth of a sample of legitimate first children with the marriage record of their parents. Analysis of the marriage-first birth interval by maternal age and race, type of marriage ceremony, and occupation of the bride and groom were conducted and comparisons with previously published data were made. Separate consideration was given to the frequency and characteristics of those births likely to be premaritally conceived and those likely to have been conceived after the wedding.     

Transitions From Sexual Relationships Into Cohabitation and Beyond

Much research on cohabitation has focused on transitions from cohabitation to marriage or dissolution, but less is known about how rapidly women progress into cohabitation, what factors are associated with the tempo to shared living, and whether the timing into cohabitation is associated with subsequent marital transitions. We use data from the 2006–2013 National Survey of Family Growth to answer these questions among women whose most recent sexual relationship began within 10 years of the interview. Life table results indicate that transitions into cohabitation are most common early in sexual relationships; nearly one-quarter of women had begun cohabiting within six months of becoming sexually involved. Multivariate analyses reveal important social class disparities in the timing to cohabitation. Not only are women from more-advantaged backgrounds significantly less likely to cohabit, but those who do cohabit enter shared living at significantly slower tempos than women whose mothers lacked a college degree. In addition, among sexual relationships that transitioned into cohabiting unions, college-educated women were significantly more likely to transition into marriage than less-educated women. Finally, although the tempo effect is only weakly significant, women who moved in within the first year of their sexual relationship demonstrated lower odds of marrying than did women who deferred cohabiting for over a year. Relationship processes are diverging by social class, contributing to inequality between more- and less-advantaged young adults.