Cohort Parity Analysis and Fertility Transition Dynamics: Reconstructing Historical Trends in Fertility Control from a Single Census

The Cohort Parity Analysis (CPA) method for the indirect measurement of the extent of marital fertility control makes use of parity distribution data of the kind reported, for specified marriage duration and marriage-age (or current age) groups of women, by a fertility census. Corresponding to every such distribution, CPA yields efficient upper and lower bounds on the proportion of controllers in the specified cohort, as well as bounds for the parity distribution of the controllers. As the women who belong to different marriage cohorts are observed at different durations of marriage in a census, it is possible to infer inter-cohort trends in the extent of fertility control (at some specified marriage duration(s)) if one knows the time pattern of the adoption of control among the members of each cohort. It is shown in this paper that robust estimates of the intracohort diffusion pattern can be obtained from the census cross-section itself, by supplementing the basic assumptions of the CPA framework with a plausible assumption about the behaviour of the ‘representative’ controller in a given cohort. The estimation technique is illustrated by applications to data for married women in urban Eire from the Census of Ireland in 1911, and to native white married women in the U.S. South from the U.S. Census of 1910.     

Estimating adult mortality levels from information on widowhood

Summary A range of indirect techniques has been developed for mortality estimation in societies lacking adequate vital registration records. Information on orphanhood has been widely used as an estimator of adult mortality, with generally plausible results. Doubts have remained, however, about potential biases, and the method is less satisfactory for the estimation of male mortality. Information on widowhood, or more strictly the survival of first spouse, has several possible advantages over information on orphanhood. Model first marriage functions and model life tables are used to calculate proportions widowed of first spouse, for both females and males, by marital duration and by age. These proportions widowed are then related to life table survivorship probabilities to provide weighting factors for the conversion of observed proportions widowed into estimates of survivorship probabilities. The application of the method is illustrated with data collected by the 1974 post-enumeration survey of Bangladesh, with apparently encouraging results.     

Urban-rural and educational differentials in marital status in China

Since 1950, laws aimed at delaying marriage have been 1 of the major means of slowing population growth in China, where marriage is nearly universal. Age at marriage has risen in recent decades, but not to the same extent in all localities. This article uses cross-tabulated data from China's 1982 census to assess the effects of urban-rural residence and educational level on the ages at which men and women have been marrying. The data also reveal the effects of residence and education on widowhood, divorce, and current marital status. As expected, exposure to development, indicated by urban residence and higher education, is associated with later marriage, but it also increases the likelihood of ever marrying, especially for men. Women's tendency to seek social mobility by marrying men from economically more developed areas results in bachelorhood for a substantial percentage of rural men, especially those who are illiterate.     

Childbearing within Marriage and Consensual Union in Latin America, 1980–2010

This article compares the fertility patterns of women in consensual union and marriage in 13 Latin American countries, using census microdata from the four most recent census rounds and a methodological approach that combines the own‐children method and Poisson regression. Results show that in all these countries, fertility is slightly higher within consensual union than marriage and that the age pattern of fertility is very similar in marital and non‐marital unions. Further analyses show that over the period considered, childbearing within a consensual union has changed from rare to increasingly common, although not yet mainstream, for highly educated women in most countries examined. Results show that in Latin America, at least since the 1980s, women's childbearing patterns depend on their age and on their being in a conjugal relationship, but not on the legal nature of this relationship. The similarities in reproductive behavior between marital and non‐marital unions are not confined to the socially disadvantaged groups, but apply as well to the better off.     

The negligible influence of premarital cohabitation on marital fertility in current danish cohorts, 1975

This paper studies the influence of premarital cohabitation on marital fertility by applying life table methods to data for cohorts of Danish women born in 1926–1955, collected in retrospective interviews made in 1975. For each five-year cohort, the data have been analyzed by duration of marriage or by duration since previous birth, for women who had no reported births before marriage. Our main empirical results are: (a) that women who married at age 15–19 had higher rates of marital first and second births than those married at ages 20–24, and (b) that premarital cohabitation had very little influence on births of these two first orders in our data.     

Measuring The Effects Of Race Differentials In Mortality Upon Surviving Family Members

A model is developed to use marital history data from the U.S. Current Population Survey and mortality statistics from the federal registration system to estimate color differences in (a) the risk of widowhood among women in the working ages and (b) the cumulative duration of widowhood. Color differentials in mortality among married males are thereby translated into person-years of dependent survivorship among women, in anticipation of our later estimating average and cumulative lifetime income losses for the survivors. Initial results of this model, dealing with the demographic aspects of survivorship, are presented.     

The Use of Own-Child Checks to Determine Remarriage Status

The 1900 Federal Census of the United States did not ask currently-married women whether they had been married previously. This note uses the direct report on remarriage in the 1910 census to evaluate the performance of the "own-child checks" that several researchers have used with the 1900 census to substitute for direct information on remarriage. Accurate information on remarriage status is important for fertility and mortality estimation methods that rely on marital duration. The checks detect fewer than two-thirds of wives who report they are remarried. The use of these checks, however, does not introduce large amounts of error in an analysis of either fertility or mortality. The checks work better for white women than for black women.     

Estimating the incidence of widow and widower re-marriages in India from census data

Summary In this paper we develop a method for estimating the incidence of widow and widower re-marriages from the current marital status data given in a census or survey. The method basically consists of reversing the procedure of estimating adult mortality from information on widowhood status. The method is applied to the all-India data from the Census of 1971. The principal result is that about one-third of the ever widowed women and slightly fewer than two-thirds of the ever widowed men were currently remarried in 1971. Similar application of the method to earlier censuses, and to state-level data, may provide answers to some of the riddles in Indian sociology.     

Marital and fertility careers of Russian women born between 1910 and 1934

Women born in Russia in the early decades of this century grew up in a period characterized by profound societal changes. Their lives were affected by often devastating events, in particular World War II, that ravaged society when they were entering their childbearing years. This note presents a detailed demographic analysis of the marital and fertility careers of women born between 1910 and 1934 based on individual retrospective life histories, collected in the most recent (5 percent) 1994 microcensus of the Russian Federation. It assesses the influence of external events on age at first marriage, widowhood, divorce, childlessness, parity, and age at birth. A comparison with younger cohorts shows that the societal disturbances had strong temporary effects. However, the final outcomes were not influenced very much: completed fertility continued its slow, secular decline.     

Models for the estimation of the probability of dying between birth and exact ages of early childhood

Abstract This paper develops two models, each of which is designed to estimate the probability of surviving from birth to selected exact ages of early childhood: namely ages two, three and five. The models are designed for use in areas with deficient registration systems. They require, as input, statistics which can be derived from retrospective data supplied by census or survey respondents. The first model, the age model, converts statistics on the proportion dead of children ever born to women in age groups 20-24, 25-29 and 30-34 into estimates of q2, q3 and q5. The second model, the marriage model, converts statistics on the proportion dead of children ever born to women of five-year marriage duration intervals into these estimates. The models can be used independently or simultaneously. These models were developed from data generated by a large number of empirical fertility and mortality schedules. Regression analysis was used to determine the parameter values of the relationships specified, and several sets of equations for estimating values of qa, for a = 2, 3 and 5 comprise the final product of the paper. It should be noted that the conceptual basis for the models was first derived by William Brass. The data generated for the regression analysis provided an opportunity to test the original Brass estimated model. We are able to report that the model performed well over the wide range of fertility and mortality conditions included in the test.     

Two and a half centuries of demographic history in a Bavarian village

Abstract A village genealogy containing family histories of couples married between 1692 and 1939 serves as the basis for a study of the demographic history of a Bavarian village. The past patterns of marriage, re-marriage, widowhood, illegitimacy, bridal pregnancy, marital fertility, family size, and birth intervals are examined. Both the age at marriage and illegitimacy increased and then declined during the nineteenth century, apparently in response to changes in restrictive marriage legislation. Differences in fertility for occupational groups were insignificant. Marital fertility remained extremely high before 1900 suggesting the absence of any substantial family limitation within marriage. A rise in marital fertility that occurred during the last half of the nineteenth century appears to result from a change in breast-feeding customs. The actual number of children surviving to maturity for most couples was kept quite low, however, through late marriage and high infant mortality. Only during the twentieth century are substantial declines in infant mortality and fertility evident.     

The effect of marital status at first birth on marital dissolution among adolescent mothers

The sequencing of marriage and first birth was expected to play an important role in the stability of marriage among adolescent mothers. We hypothesized that adolescent women who married prior to conception would have the lowest rates of marital disruption, followed by those who married between conception and birth. Adolescent women who gave birth prior to marriage were expected to suffer the highest rates of marital dissolution. The results provide partial support for our hypotheses. There is little difference in the probability of separation between adolescent mothers who had a postmarital conception and those who had a premarital conception but married before the birth. Having a premarital birth, however, significantly increases the probability of marital dissolution. We also hypothesized that marital status at first birth would have less effect on the probability of marital dissolution for blacks than for whites. This, too, is generally supported by our findings. Among black females, those with a premarital birth are the first to suffer a marital disruption, but by the end of ten years there is little difference in the probability of separation among the three marital status groups. In contrast, among white females, those with a premarital birth are the first to experience a disruption, and this differential persists over all subsequent marriage duration intervals. Thus, the sequencing of marriage relative to birth has similar short term effects for whites and blacks, but the effect for blacks is evident only in the short term. Ten years after the marriage, black adolescent mothers have similar rates of marital stability regardless of the sequencing of marriage. This is consistent with the findings of previous research and with our hypothesis; with the black family pattern of lower rates of marriage, higher rates of illegitimacy and higher divorce rates, the sequencing of marriage has no long lasting consequences on marital stability. Finally, our predicted decline in the effect of marital status at first birth over historical time also finds partial support. For white females there has been a change in the effect of marriage-first birth sequencing on separation over time. In the period encompassed by the women in our study, white adolescent mothers who married subsequent to the birth have been the most likely to experience a separation at all marriage duration intervals, but this differential narrows as age at interview declines. Among black females there has been no change in the effect of a premarital birth over time.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 400 WORDS)     

Cohort parity analysis: Statistical estimates of the extent of fertility control

Cohort parity analysis (CPA) is a method for indirect measurement of the extent and timing of the adoption of fertility control within marriage. It uses information on the parity distribution of a cohort of women of specified marriage ages and durations. A multinomial model of parity provides a convenient framework for the computation of distributional parameters describing the extent to which marital fertility control has been accepted and characterizing the way control has been used within specific durations of marriage. This leads to a pair of easily implemented formulas for upper- and lower-bound estimates of the expected proportion of the population ever controlling and the distribution of controllers by parity. The power of CPA is illustrated, using census data for currently married couples in Dublin, Belfast, and other county boroughs of Ireland in 1911.     

中国大陆婚姻状况变迁及婚姻挤压问题分析

本文以2005年全国1％人口抽样调查数据为基础,通过城乡之间的比较,借助对婚姻挤压以及中国大龄未婚人口现象的系统描述来揭示其存在的特征和后果。婚姻挤压和大龄未婚现象既与个人因素有关,同样受到社会结构变迁的影响,不仅在性别上有所差异,城乡之间也存在较大差别,农村未婚女青年的比例较低,最多的大龄未婚女青年集中在城市。而婚姻迁移和社会对于男女两性的期望不同将会对新的婚姻挤压问题造成进一步的冲击。     

African widows: anthropological and historical perspectives

Variety characterizes widows' experiences around the world and in Africa south of the Sahara. This article explores the socioeconomic and cultural contexts of African widowhood, using anthropological studies in a number of African societies, including the author's research among Abaluyia of western Kenya. Some features of African widowhood are characteristic of African women's lives regardless of their marital status: their embeddedness in kinship systems and dependence on those systems for claims to productive resources, their economic self-reliance (which does not mean prosperity), strongly gendered divisions of labor, and the pervasiveness of patriarchal gender relations. Other features are specific to widowhood, including remarriage, issues of personal autonomy, and loss of status, access to productive resources and social support. Colonial and postcolonial historical transformations, including Africa's current dire economic situation and the AIDS epidemic, are considered in relation to widows' lives. An interesting question (given the theme of this edited volume) is whether a husband' s death puts African widows "on their own again," and whether, given African systems of kinship and marriage, most African women (and indeed men, too) can ever be said to be "on their own."     

The multistate life table with duration-dependence

"A method for generalizing the multistate, or increment-decrement, life table to include rates which depend upon duration of exposure to risk, as well as upon age, is proposed. The method is built upon the linear approximation, called the linear integration hypothesis, developed mainly by Rogers and his colleagues....It is possible to derive several new summary indices of the life-table cohort's history, such as the mean and median time in current status, at any age. The method is illustrated using a simple four-state marital-status model which has appeared often in the literature; here, rates of divorce and widowhood vary by duration of marriage as well as age." An example is demonstrated using 1984 period data for women in Finland aged 15-50. (SUMMARY IN FRE)     

Estimating a marriage matching model with spillover effects

We use marriage matching functions to study how marital patterns change when population supplies change. Specifically, we use a behavioral marriage matching function with spillover effects to rationalize marriage and cohabitation behavior in contemporary Canada. The model can estimate a couple's systematic gains to marriage and cohabitation relative to remaining single. These gains are invariant to changes in population supplies. Instead, changes in population supplies redistribute these gains between a couple. Although the model is behavioral, it is nonparametric. It can fit any observed cross-sectional marriage matching distribution. We use the estimated model to quantify the impacts of gender differences in mortality rates and the baby boom on observed marital behavior in Canada. The higher mortality rate of men makes men scarcer than women. We show that the scarceness of men modestly reduced the welfare of women and increased the welfare of men in the marriage market. On the other hand, the baby boom increased older men's net gains to entering the marriage market and lowered middle-aged women's net gains.