Understanding Reproductive Lifespans and Intensities, a Global Analysis

• In Event: 20816 - Fertility Patterns in Economic and Cultural Context

Abstract

The way demographers have long looked at fertility has revolved around measuring points over time (fertility rates), as well as time between points (parity progression). Notably, these methods focus on births themselves, and do not consider these events within the context of women’s lives. In order to understand fertility paths women from a life course perspective, we develop and descriptively analyze two measures of fertility timing: reproductive span, the time between a woman's first and last birth; and reproductive intensity, the proportion of a woman's life she spends pregnant and rearing small children. We descriptively examine both of these measures globally across 51 countries using Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) and Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) data. We then examine differences in reproductive intensity between more educated and less educated women with regard to their country’s educational context. We find that there is wide variation in both reproductive span and intensity across regions and between countries. Furthermore, we find that nearly all "less educated" women in our sample spend longer amounts of their life pregnant and childrearing. This descriptive analysis demonstrates that measures of reproductive span and intensity put birth timing within the context of the life course, and prompts new directions in studying the relationship between fertility and other social, economic, and political forces.

Authors

• Erika-Ann Kim, University of Michigan-Ann Arbor

• Margaret Frye, University of Michigan-Ann Arbor

• Sara Lopus, California Polytechnic State University-San Luis Obispo