Category Fertility
Parenting culture and gender equality: the case of Iceland
Despite Iceland’s reputation as one of the most gender equal countries, Sunna Símonardóttir’s research suggests that parenthood is still very much equated with motherhood in the country.
Armed conflict and family formation: How the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict affected fertility and early marriage in Azerbaijan
With levels of political violence spiking dramatically in the last decades, addressing the consequences of armed conflict for population dynamics is of paramount importance. In this post, Orsola Torrisi presents findings from research on family formation in Azerbaijan, a country embroiled in a violent, yet mostly forgotten conflict with Armenia since the early 1990s.
Welcoming Contraception Failure? Towards a Flexible Model of Reproductive Decision-Making
Lea Taragin-Zeller discusses the lived experience of contraceptive choice and childbearing. Today, we have come used to thinking of every child as either “planned” or “unplanned”. Children are either a calculated choice of rational parents or a “mistake” made by irresponsible parents. But, while I was conducting research among Israel’s Orthodox Jews, I realised that […]
Understanding the Gap between Fertility Ideals and Intentions in Four Postindustrial Societies
Xiana Bueno and Mary Brinton write about the gap between fertility ideals and intentions in Sweden, Japan, United States and Spain.
A functional data analysis approach for forecasting age-specific population size: A case study for the United Kingdom
Han Lin Shang writes about forecasting age-specific population size based on an example of the UK. In recent decades, we have seen a considerable amount of development in the stochastic modelling and forecasting of population. Cohort component projection models are often used to model the evolution of age-specific population, and are particularly useful to highlight which […]
Notes on the relationship between education and fertility among men
Jessica Nisén writes about educational differences in fertility among men. Interest and literature on fertility patterns of men is on the increase among demographers. While educational differences in women’s fertility have been well documented, there is less corresponding research on men. The long-standing finding that women educated to higher levels often end up childless and […]
The geography of maternal health in the Sustainable Development Goal era – No woman left behind
Cori Ruktanochai presents maternal health outcomes at subnational level for five Sub Saharian African countries.
Studying fertility in Israel with structural equation modeling
This post by Evgenia Bystrov highlights the controversy around the ultimate causes of high fertility in Israel: religiosity or nationalism. There is a long-running debate on the drivers of fertility among Jews in Israel. Two papers in particular stand out: Friedlander and Feldmann’s (1993) and Anson and Meir’s (1996). Surprisingly, the papers reach a different […]
Mind the gap: the compass of foregone fertility in Europe
“You can’t always get what you want” sang Mick Jagger in 1969. Four decades and a whole fertility transition later, European women wishing to form a family are well aware of the meaning of these lyrics. Over these four decades, desired family size has not changed much, with a predominant preference for two children, while […]
Childlessness in Spain: Tick Tock, Tick Tock, Tick Tock!
In this article, Albert Esteve, Daniel Devolder, and Andreu Domingo provide new insights about childlessness in Spain, drawn from his recent research published in Perspectives Demogràfiques.childlessness in the Spanish context offering a cohort perspective. You can find the complete article on Perspectives Demogràfiques from Centre d’Estudis Demogràfics.
Infrastructural Challenges in Maternity and Newborn Care in Rural Kenya
In this post Hildah Essendi (PhD) discusses her research on access to maternal and newborn care in two rural communities in Kenya. The efforts and commitments to accelerate progress towards the Millennium Development Goals for maternal and newborn health (MDGs 4 and 5) in low and middle income countries have focused primarily on providing key […]
Fertility from a Bayesian perspective – worth trying?
This guest post by Beata Osiewalska discusses and describes her research on Bayesian approaches in fertility analysis. Is it possible to see the probability distribution over the number of children for a person with some particular demographic or socio-economic background? Have you ever wondered what this distribution would look like in your case? In this […]
Location, location, location! Why space matters in demography and why we should care.
Alessandra Carioli (Netherlands Interdisciplinary Demographic Institute) prepared this overview based on her study presented at EPC 2014 in Budapest “A Spatial Analysis of Recent Fertility Patterns in Spain”. This study won one of the poster awards at EPC 2014 and is co-authored together with Daniel Devolder (Centre d’Estudis Demographics, UAB) and Joaquin Recaño (Centre d’Estudis […]
Endogeneity vs causality in family research: is it always the chicken-and-egg problem?
This is a post by Evgenia Bystrov based on her article Testing the Second Demographic Transition Theory with Seemingly Unrelated Regression: Marital Postponement and Human Empowerment recently published in the European Sociological Review. The article focuses on the relations between values and marriage behaviour. The writing of this article was triggered by numerous academic debates […]
How to Tackle the Socioeconomic Inequalities of Teenage Pregnancy
This is a post by Heini Väisänen based on her article “Social Inequalities in Teenage Fertility Outcomes: Childbearing and Abortion Trends of Three Birth Cohorts in Finland”. Heini Väisänen is a PhD candidate in demography at the London School of Economics and Political Science. In the media, Finland is often displayed as an example of […]
Chicken Little cried ‘Fertility is falling, fertility is falling, go tell the king’
This is a guest post by Ann Larson. Ann Larson is a demographer specializing in evaluating regional development and global health programs. She blogs from her home in rural Western Australia. In a recent tweet Demotrends shared a media report that France’s fertility was dipping below 2 children per woman. Doom was predicted to inevitably follow—French women’s […]
Research spotlight: When legalising abortion isn’t enough
LSE’s Ernestina Coast is the Principal Investigator on a new research project in Zambia that seeks to establish how investment in abortion services impacts the socio-economic conditions of women and their households. Zambia’s relatively liberal abortion laws make the country a rare case in sub-Saharan Africa, a region where abortion is generally prohibited altogether or […]
Originally posted on Demographics Revealed!:
by Carl Haub, senior demographer, Population Reference Bureau No demographic subject captures writers’ imaginations like a country’s birth rate, be it baby “booms” or “busts,” or record highs or lows. But what measure should you use when you’re writing about the birth rate? Yes, there’s more than one—there are three:…
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