Pregnancy avoidance and coital behavior

This study proposes a behavioral model that identifies determinants of coital activity in the context of pregnancy avoidance and assesses the relationships using weekly panel data collected on 300 rural married women in Sri Lanka in 1988. We discuss the utility of the design, which is similar to that of an epidemiological surveillance system, for the measurement of coital behavior and pregnancy risk perceptions. Perceptions of pregnancy risk, spousal agreement on sexual relations, menstrual and lactational status, and cycle timing, all measured daily, are found to influence significantly the probability of coitus on that day. The findings suggest that substantial gains in studying fertility regulation are likely from closer investigation of the behavioral connections between motivation for pregnancy avoidance and coital incidence. Comparison of such panel data with those of cross-sectional sample surveys also provides insights into the validity of measures of coital and contraceptive behavior.     

Labor force participation of working mothers and family formation: Some further evidence

This paper offers additional insight and evidence on the well-documented inverse relationship between female employment and fertility. Interviews with 388 working mothers from a probability sample in Robeson County, North Carolina, provide the data for testing the hypothesized relationships. Generally, the results indicate that lower fertility, lower desires and expectations, and earlier use of birth control are associated with work before the first birth and with employment of the longest duration. The timing of the first birth was not differentiated by variations in work experience. The results are conditional in that the relationships hold more for whites than for blacks or Indians.     

Conflicting Preferences: A Reason Fertility Tends to Be Too High or Too Low

Fertility has often seemed to be too high or too low, relative not only to social and economic goals, but also to reproductive preferences. In developing countries actual fertility has often been higher than desired family size, while in developed societies fertility tends to be below replacement level even though people generally say that they want at least two children. In explanations of fertility extremes, or of the discrepancies between desired and actual fertility, the effect of partners' holding different preferences has tended to be overlooked. Individual preferences expected to lead to replacement‐level reproduction may in combination generate substantially higher or lower fertility. In explaining such outcomes, a crucial question is what happens when spousal preferences diverge. Given that personal practices or social norms may systematically favor high or low preferences in the event of disagreement, chance alone will ensure that desired and actual fertility do not coincide.     

The Relationship Between Serious Leisure Characteristics and Subjective Well-Being of Older Adult Volunteers: The Moderating Effect of Spousal Support

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationships between serious leisure characteristics and subjective well-being as well as clarify the moderating effect of spousal support in their relationships. A total of 264 valid questionnaires were collected from a sample of older adult volunteers in Taiwan. Structural equation modeling was used to estimate a model linking serious leisure, spousal support to subjective wellbeing. As expected, the results show that older adult volunteers having greater serious leisure characteristics lead to a high level of subjective well-being. The findings further revealed that spousal support moderated the effect of serious leisure characteristics on subjective well-being. This indicates that the higher the level of spousal support, the larger is the likelihood that serious leisure will lead to greater subjective well-being. The results are suggested to be useful references for the older adult volunteers while improving spousal support, in order to increase the level of well-being.     

Age,biological factors,and socioeconomic determinants of fertility: A new measure of cumulative fertility for use in the empirical analysis of family size

To influence the number of children ever born to a woman, socioeconomic variables must operate through behavioral and biological mechanisms such as the age at marriage, the level of fertility in the absence of deliberate fertility control, and the level of control exerted to reduce fertility within marriage. In this paper, we propose a new measure of cumulative fertility which is standardized for the age-fecundity relationship and for exposure to the risk of conception associated with duration of marriage. A simple model of fertility behavior which incorporates some of the mechanisms through which socioeconomic factors may affect fertility is developed and applied to data from the United States to demonstrate the properties of alternative measures of family size. The results indicate that use of the new measure allows more precise estimates of socioeconomic fertility relationships than would be obtained with children ever born or by sample stratification.     

Preference for Sons,Family Size,and Sex Ratio: An Empirical Study in Korea

This study investigates the effects of son preference on sex ratio and fertility at the family level, utilizing World Fertility Survey data for Korea, whose population is known to have a strong preference for sons and a fairly high level of contraceptive use. The sex ratio (number of males per 100 females) of siblings in small families is considerably higher than in large families. The sex ratio of last-born children in families of any size is markedly higher than that of the previous children. The sex distribution of children for a given family size, if less than five, deviates significantly from the Bernoulli sequence. The observed frequency of all-girl families is especially small in comparison with the expected value. The sex of the last child strongly influences couples' decision making regarding additional births in all steps of family building except for bearing a second child. In increasing their families to moderate size, parents appear to take into consideration the sex distribution of all earlier births.     

中国农村居民家庭的生育决策模型与实证分析

根据"五普"和"六普"资料,人口总和生育率显著低于世代更替水平,这表明中国人口进入了低生育水平发展阶段。关于这一问题的合理解释是除了计划生育政策影响外,农村家庭生育决策的变化可能是内生的重要影响因素。基于生育决策模型及实证分析,得出这样的结论:在土地量保持不变的条件下,农村居民家庭的生育决策主要取决于收入水平和抚养子女的成本。农村居民家庭可能会依据"量质权衡"减少生育子女,这可能是导致中国人口生育水平下降的根本原因。     

Formerly Incarcerated Parents and Their Children

The negative effects of incarceration on child well-being are often linked to the economic insecurity of formerly incarcerated parents. Researchers caution, however, that the effects of parental incarceration may be small in the presence of multiple-partner fertility and other family complexity. Despite these claims, few studies have directly observed either economic insecurity or the full extent of family complexity. We study parent-child relationships with a unique data set that includes detailed information about economic insecurity and family complexity among parents just released from prison. We find that stable private housing, more than income, is associated with close and regular contact between parents and children. Formerly incarcerated parents see their children less regularly in contexts of multiple-partner fertility and in the absence of supportive family relationships. Significant housing and family effects are estimated even after we control for drug use and crime, which are themselves negatively related to parental contact. The findings point to the constraints of material insecurity and the complexity of family relationships on the contact between formerly incarcerated parents and their children.     

Toward a general framework of family structure: A review of theory-based empirical research

For slightly more than a century, psychologists, sociologists, demographers, and others have been studying family structure. The enterprise has been repeatedly characterized as having strong empirical roots, but little theory to nurture it and help it develop. Recently, articles have been published calling for the formalization of family demography, which we define as the discipline devoted to the study of family structure. This paper has the following purposes: (1) To develop a general taxonomy of family structure that unites researchers from several disciplines under one framework; (2) To review important methodological and measurement problems involved in the study of family structure; and (3) To review the recent theory-based empirical literature. We conclude with an assessment of the state-of-the-enterprise.This research was supported in part by a junior faculty research fellowship from the University of Oklahoma to the first author. The Carolina Population Center and the University of North Carolina Department of Psychology provided research and library assistance. Special thanks are extended to Thomas Berndt, George Holden, J. Richard Udry, and several anonymous reviewers who read and commented on earlier drafts of this article.     

Is Stepfamily Status Associated With Cohabiting and Married Women’s Fertility Behaviors?

Children from prior relationships potentially complicate fertility decision-making in new cohabitations and marriages. On the one hand, the “value of children” perspective suggests that unions with and without stepchildren have similar—and deliberate—reasons for shared childbearing. On the other hand, multipartnered fertility (MPF) research suggests that childbearing across partnerships is often unintended. Using the 2006–2010 National Survey of Family Growth and event-history models, I examine the role of stepfamily status on cohabiting and married women’s fertility and birth intendedness, with attention to union type and stepfamily configuration. Adjusting for covariates, women in stepfamily unions are more likely to have a first shared birth in a union than women in unions in which neither partner has children from past relationships, but stepfamily births are less likely to be intended than unintended. Further, this association varies by union type: married women have similar birth risks across stepfamily status, but births are less likely to be intended in marital stepfamilies. For cohabitors, women in a stepfamily are more likely to have a birth than women in nonstepfamily unions, with no differences in intendedness. Configuration (whose children and how many) also matters; for instance, women with one child from a past relationship are more likely to have a birth and to have an intended than unintended birth than women with other stepfamily configurations. It appears that children from either partner’s prior relationships influences subsequent fertility decision-making, undermining the utility of the “value of children” perspective for explaining childbearing behaviors in complex families.     

Urbanization, non-familial work, education, and fertility in Taiwan

Abstract It is well known, that there is a relationship between the level of development of a society and its level offertility.(1) However, it is not clear which of the complex ofvariables associated with development are primarily associated with the reduction of fertility. Urbanization, female labour force participation and education are three of the variables most commonly cited as bearing a causal relationship to fertility. Urbanization implies a change of environment of a substantial portion of the population which may result in a change in the value placed on large families. This is particularly true when urban mortality is lower than rural, so that more children survive.(2) However, it has also been argued that urbanization results in a change in family structure from the extended to the nuclear family with a concomitant reduction in the value placed on having many children.(3) Additional changes in family patterns which are sometimes said to explain fertility reduction due to urbanization are increases in the proportion of women never marrying and increases in the age at marriage.     

The Effect of Prenatal Natural Disaster Exposure on School Outcomes

This study looks at the impact of exposure to natural disasters during pregnancy on the educational outcomes of North Carolina children at the third grade level. A broad literature relates negative birth outcomes to poor educational performance, and a number of recent studies have examined the effect of prenatal exposure to natural disasters on birth outcomes. This study takes the next step by considering how prenatal exposure affects later outcomes. Combining North Carolina administrative data on births and school performance with disaster declarations from the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) allows for the identification of children who were exposed to disasters during prenatal development. These children are compared with other children born in the same county who were not exposed to disasters while in utero. Regression results suggest that children exposed to hurricanes prenatally have lower scores on third grade standardized tests in math and reading. Those exposed to flooding or tornadoes also have somewhat lower math scores. Additionally, results suggest that these negative effects are more concentrated among children in disadvantaged subgroups, especially children born to black mothers. However, no evidence exists that these effects are mediated by common measures of birth outcomes, including birth weight and gestational age.     

Modernization and Tradition in the Recent History of Italian Fertility

The secular decline of Italian fertility, started in the last decade of the nineteenth century, came to an end in the early 1950'sand has recovered slightly in the last fifteen years. Italian experience seems to follow, with a twenty-year lag, the experience of the more advanced western European populations. At present, with an average of 2.5 children per marriage, Italian fertility is very close to the French and to the average European level.At the regional level, two contrasting patterns can be detected. On one side stands the very low fertility of the North and of the Center, mostly below replacement in the last thirty years;on the other, the still high fertility of the South.In the North and in the Center, where the decline started earlier, fertility has fallen well below replacement level in the last thirty years. In the South, where the decline started in the late 1920's and early 1930's, a large family system still prevails, and the spreading of voluntary control faces barriers setup by a long historyof cultural isolation,attachment to tradition and religion. In the last 15 years, however, the gap has narrowed slowly, more because of an upturn of fertility in the North and in the Center than because of the decline in the South.Another interesting feature of Italian fertility is low class differentials: the fertility of the most prolific segment (farmers, farm laborers) is only 20 percent higher than the fertility of the less prolific professional groups. Finally, Italian experience provides an interesting example of the changing relationship linking the economic level of the population and fertility changes; in 1931-51 a negative correlation linked the changes in fertility to the economic level of the region, while in 1951-61 and 1961-66 a very high and positive correlation can be observed.As for the future trends in fertility, two factors may have an important role. In the first place, on the one hand, the economic policy of the government, aiming at reducing the economic gap between the South and the rest of the country, may accelerate the leveling of regional fertility differentials. The same effect, on the other hand, may be reached by more liberal legislation, now under way, for birth control and family planning propaganda.     

Emotional Variation and Fertility Behavior

Emotional influences on fertility behaviors are an understudied topic that may offer a clear explanation of why many couples choose to have children even when childbearing is not economically rational. With setting-specific measures of the husband-wife emotional bond appropriate for large-scale population research matched with data from a long-term panel study, we have the empirical tools to provide a test of the influence of emotional factors on contraceptive use to limit fertility. This article presents those tests. We use long-term, multilevel community and family panel data to demonstrate that the variance in levels of husband-wife emotional bond is significantly associated with their subsequent use of contraception to avert births. We discuss the wide-ranging implications of this intriguing new result.     

Urbanization,non-familial work,education, and fertility in Taiwan

It is well known, that there is a relationship between the level of development of a society and its level offertility.¹ However, it is not clear which of the complex ofvariables associated with development are primarily associated with the reduction of fertility. Urbanization, female labour force participation and education are three of the variables most commonly cited as bearing a causal relationship to fertility. Urbanization implies a change of environment of a substantial portion of the population which may result in a change in the value placed on large families. This is particularly true when urban mortality is lower than rural, so that more children survive.² However, it has also been argued that urbanization results in a change in family structure from the extended to the nuclear family with a concomitant reduction in the value placed on having many children.³ Additional changes in family patterns which are sometimes said to explain fertility reduction due to urbanization are increases in the proportion of women never marrying and increases in the age at marriage.     

对解放后我国居民生育意愿变化情况的历史考察

生育意愿是人口学和社会学领域的一个重要研究话题,其转变受社会经济发展水平的影响,是生育率下降和人口转变的前提条件。本文运用历史考察和文献分析的方法。主要从生育目的、意愿生育子女数和恚愚生育性别三个雏度来探讨我国居民生育意愿的变化情况,摸索其中的变化规律,进而提出国家和政府应针对不同地区和不同人群。制定相应的、灵活而更具可操作性的计划生育政策,使生育政策在调节生育率水平的同时兼顾人们的生育意愿。     

Family structure and and fertility behavior in Taiwan

The present analysis is based on the 1990 Taiwan Human Resources Survey to study the relationships between family structure, women's complete fertility and birth spacing. Imputed family size, as measured by either the ideal number of children expressed by a married woman or the number of actual surviving children whichever is larger, is used as a proxy of a woman's complete fertility. The results indicate a majority of married couples in Taiwan begin married life living with the husband's parents and later move out to establish a nuclear unit. This limited experience in the extended family exerts an upward pressure on imputed family size even when other relevant variables are statistically controlled. Further, the effect of living with the husband's parents on shorter duration of birth spacing is only limited to the time when the parents provide free child- care for married couples.     

Social Relationships and Children’s Subjective Well-Being

The quality of relationships is now recognised as an important aspect of children??s subjective well-being. This article focuses on both positive and negative quality of relationships. It includes six areas of children??s relationships??family, neighbourhood adults, positive affect friendship, negative affect friendship, experiences of being bullied by other young people, and being treated unfairly by adults and analyses their association with children??s subjective well-being. Data for this study were obtained from a national survey among 4,673 children in secondary schools across England. Children??s relationships with their family, friends (positive affect) and neighbourhood adults appear to increase their well-being, whereas, negative aspects of friendship relations, experiences of being bullied and treated unfairly by adults is proved to decrease young people??s well-being. Relationships with family, positive relations with friends and experience of being bullied appear to have respectively the first, second and third highest effect on children??s subjective well-being. Although the influence was low, children??s relationships with neighbourhood adults, their experiences of being treated unfairly by adults and their negative relations with friends contributed significantly to explaining variations of their subjective well-being. These findings are discussed in the context of previous empirical studies and theories on social relationships and subjective well-being. Suggestions for future research are also put forward.     

The emergence of Sub-Replacement Family Size Ideals in Europe

Period fertility started to drop significantly below replacement in most Western European countries during the 1970s and 1980s, while most fertility surveys, value studies and opinion polls have found that the number of children considered ideal for society or for one's own family has remained above two children per woman. These surveys have led to the expectation that, sooner or later, period fertility would recover in Europe. The most recent data from the Eurobarometer 2001 survey, however, suggest that in the German-speaking parts of Europe the average ideal family sizes given by younger men and women have fallen as low as 1.7 children. This paper examines the consistency and the credibility of these new findings, which – if they are indeed indications of a new trend – may alter the current discussion about future fertility trends in Europe.     

Simultaneity in the use of maternal-child health care and contraceptives: evidence from developing countries

This study examined the relationship between the use of maternal-child health (MCH) care and the use of contraceptives. The high correlation between the two may be due to the independent effect of one on the other or to an association of both with the same or similar background factors. We used structural equation models to examine the relationship between these two interventions. The data were derived from six Demographic and Health Surveys: Zimbabwe from Sub-Saharan Africa, Thailand from Asia, Egypt and Tunisia from North Africa, and Guatemala and Colombia from Latin America. The results show that in all six countries, the use of contraceptives and MCH care are significantly associated, independent of intervening factors; this finding suggests that families develop a joint demand for better-quality health and limited family size and translate these demands into action by using health services for mothers and for children and by voluntarily regulating fertility.