Tag Archives: Israel

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 […]

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 […]

The Demographics behind Elections

March the 17th 2015 was Election Day for the 20th Knesset (parliament) in Israel. With voting being a confidential affair it is impossible to know exactly who voted for each party. Thus it is hard to know how voting is broken down demographically. This is where surveys come in, asking respondents who they intend to […]

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 […]

Research spotlight: When population composition effects reverse public opinion

Evgenia Bystrov shows in her recently published article “Religion, demography and attitudes toward civil marriage in Israel 1969–2009” how the changing population composition affects total agreement to introduce the institution of civil marriage. Although the civic right to get married is granted in most countries on this planet, in the developed world there is also […]