Family-building in a Canadian City: An analysis of the timing and spacing of pregnancies
| Autor: | Janet Sceats Pool |
|---|---|
| Rok vydání: | 1978 |
| Předmět: | |
| Zdroj: | Population Studies. 32:583-592 |
| ISSN: | 1477-4747 0032-4728 |
| DOI: | 10.1080/00324728.1978.10412817 |
| Popis: | A survey was conducted in Ottawa Canada to examine interval-specific fertility using 2 hypotheses: 1) interpregnancy intervals will be shorter and the probabilities of higher parities will be greater for women whose reproductive experience coincided with the baby boom and 2) that almost all women will have 2 pregnancies but the interval between marriage and the first pregnancy would be different for younger women than for older ones. The sample was drawn from a group of ever-married women aged 15-44 years living in low density housing in 1972. 4 possible sources of bias in the data would be: 1) the difficulty in ascertaining whether differences between cohorts in mean age at event y are real changes in patterns of reproductive behavior or resulting from censoring; 2) in a cross-sectional study even with a cohort women who experience a first pregnancy early in their lives are more likely to be represented than women who delay their first pregnancy; 3) ever-married women will be underrepresented; and 4) childless married couples living in high density apartments will be underrepresented. To correct and adjust the data truncation was used with life table methodology. 2 series of cohort double-decrement life tables were constructed using the respondents age to determine the birth cohort: A) based on age at event y and B) on the length of the interval between events y and y + 1. Further adjustments included standardizing the factors observed using means and lower quartiles to summarize and using lower quartiles to isolate certain respondents. Findings showed that 96% of the Ottawa women who marry would have at least 1 pregnancy but the probability of a woman aged 40-44 years to have a 4th pregnancy would only be .2720. Members of older cohorts experienced the major part of their reproduction during the baby boom of the late 1950s and early 1960s and tended toward family building at an early age a trend that reversed in the next 5 years. The data also show a decline in family size. Also the probability of pregnancy decreased as age increased and there is a further years delay with each pregnancy for more births. |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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