Kate's questions and comments

Kate's questions and comments

by Kate Chirikova -

Bongaarts outlines two models for the transition of fertility, a leader-follower model and permanent difference model. However, according to the data provided for both developing and developed countries, a leader-follower model finds no use. I wonder how these two models were informed in the first place. Was there ever a country that followed a leader-follower model? 

Bongaarts shows data on wanted/ unwanted fertility. I wonder how this was measured. Was there actually a question asking something like "How many children were you planning to have?" or "How many of your children were wanted?". It's hard for me to imagine how this sort of question could yield an unbiased measurement. And it's not just the fact that the question is a bit weird. But also it comes with an underlying assumption that everyone do some kind of family planning, which, I think, is something more common in the developed part of the world, rather than in the developing countries. As a result, such measurement of wanted/ unwanted fertility could mean different things coming from different countries/ cultures.

And a quick thought about the topic of abortion-related policies, and specifically "The remarkable story of Romanian women's struggle to manage their fertility". It's striking and devastating how disproportionate the effect of abortion restriction (+ absence of modern contraception) is on fertility and maternal mortality. Yes, one gains something in fertility by making abortion illegal, but how much more one loses due to highly increasing maternal mortality.

Re: Kate's questions and comments

by Charles Fleischmann -
Re: wanted/ unwanted fertility. I am also curious about what questions were used when calculating desired family size. I agree that the tense of the question makes a big difference; "how many children did you want?" is a lot different that "how many children do you want?" Based on the discussion in page 7 I would guess that the DHS question was simply "what is your desired family size?".
Still, I can imagine that mothers would be less likely to say that the nth child is 'unwanted' if that child has already been born- so it probably makes a big difference at what point during the mother's childbearing life the question is posed to her.

Re: Kate's questions and comments

by Nadia Diamond-Smith -
These are great questions, and there are a lot of different opinions and approaches to measuring desired family size/unintended pregnancies. Often fertility surveys ask both "did your most recent pregnancy happen at the time you wanted, sooner than you wanted, later than you wanted, or was not wanted", "how many more children would you want if you were to want another child" and then the timing of that next pregnancy. But the first question of course does get into issues of ex post rationalization, and studies have found that its associated with all sorts of things (health of that child, sex of that child, etc.) Longitudinal studies can somewhat take this into account, however, people's desired fertility timing/preferences also change, so just because 1 year ago someone said they didn't want another kid now, doesn't mean that this current baby is unwanted. Here is an interesting article about fertility uncertainty: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5900734/
Also I recommend anything by Jennifer Johnson-Hanks at Berkeley, shes got some great writing on this!

Kate's questions and comments

by Carolyn Hughes -
Re: Leader-follower model (and permanent difference). I took it as a representation of the two theories mentioned in the introduction as to whether the differential in fertility by education would be transient and disappear (end of leader-follower), or if it would remain even at the end of the transition (permanent difference). Bongaarts mentions that "some analysts" (Jeffery and Basu, Lutz and Goujon, Cleland) think the differential would disappear, but that "conventional wisdom ... leads one to expect that educational differences in fertility will remain....". I wonder if Bongaarts intended "conventional wisdom" to be a dig at the others' theory? I tried to look up Jeffrey and Basu, and it looks like there may have been some evidence that a leader-follower model may fit some countries, but I didn't have a ton of time and it's hard to find the full text.