Intergenerational transmission of reproductive behavior during the demographic transition

New evidence from the Utah Population Database (UPDP) reveals that at the onset of the fertility transition, reproductive behavior was transmitted across generations - between women and their mothers, as well as between women and their husbands' family of origin. Age at marriage, age at last birth, and the number of children ever born are positively correlated in the data, most strongly among first-born daughters and among cohorts born later in the fertility transition. Intergenerational ties, including the presence of mothers and mothers-in-law, influenced the hazard of progressing to a next birth. The findings suggest that the practice of parity-dependent marital fertility control and inter-birth spacing behavior derived, in part, from the previous generation and that the potential for mothers and mothers-in-law to help in the rearing of children encouraged higher marital fertility.     

Learning through Upheaval: Strategies for Analyzing and Construing Emerging Sociopolitical Transformations in the Middle East

The irreducible complexity and singular unpredictability of the upheavals that have roiled the Middle East since December 2010 challenge analysts—from university students to policymakers—to grapple with irresolvable questions; this, rather than analysts' superimposing their own visions of what might constitute the upheavals' driving forces, and what will, or should be the outcomes of the regional turmoil. Drawing on strategies gleaned from teaching about the Arab uprisings, this article asserts that the uprisings may be collectively read as comprising a text that contains signs of indeterminacy pointing to many possible meanings and sources of meanings. Focus is placed on those signs that embody the differing discourses through which the Middle East upheavals are, have been, or can be represented and assessed; and the fluid, multidimensional forms of political identity that have contributed to the upheavals, and are being further reshaped, in their wake. By reading these signs with intellectual openness and humility, interpreters can achieve greater insight into the profoundly contingent and unforeseeable dynamics at work across the region.     

Reconstruction of birth histories using children ever born and children surviving data from the 1900 and 1910 U.S. censuses

Abstract

This paper describes a method to reconstruct birth histories for women in the 1900 and 1910?U. S. census IPUMS samples. The method is an extension of an earlier method developed by Luther and Cho (1988 Luther, N. Y., and L. Cho. 1988. Reconstruction of birth histories from census and household survey data. Population Studies 42 (3):451–72. doi: 10.1080/0032472031000143586.[Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]). The basic method relies on the number of children ever born, number of children surviving, number of children coresident in the household and age-specific fertility rates for the population to probabilistically assign an “age” to deceased and unmatched children. Modifications include the addition of an iterative Poisson regression model to fine-tune age-specific fertility inputs. The potential of birth histories for the study of the U.S. fertility transition is illustrated with a few examples.