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Attitudes About Children and Fertility Limitation Behavior

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Abstract

The relationship between attitudes and individual behavior is at the core of virtually all demographic theories of fertility. This paper extends our understanding of fertility behavior by exploring how psychic costs of childbearing and contraceptive use, conceptualized as attitudes about children and contraception, are related to the transition from high fertility and little contraceptive use to lower fertility and wide spread contraceptive use. Using data from rural Nepal, I examine models of the relationship between multiple, setting-specific attitudes about children and contraception and the hazard of contraceptive use to limit childbearing. Specific attitude measures attempt to capture the relative value of children versus consumer goods, the religiously based value of children, and the acceptability of contraceptive use. Findings demonstrate that multiple measures of women’s attitudes about children and contraception were all independently related to their fertility limitation behavior.

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Notes

  1. Hinduization is the process whereby non-Hindu groups are encouraged to incorporate Hindu beliefs and practices to achieve assimilation into larger society (Guneratne 1994, 1998, 2002).

  2. This theoretical link is also relevant to an analysis of contraceptive use for multiple reasons (i.e., to space children or regulate menstruation), not just to limit childbearing. However, because the major shift in demographic behavior of interest in this setting is the ending of childbearing I continue to frame the discussion in terms of limiting childbearing, not merely controlling.

  3. During the first interview upon turning 18, respondents were asked to report their contraceptive use for each month between ages 15 and 18.

  4. 80 women were excluded due to missing data on one or more of the measures described below.

    Limiting the sample to women who had no previous contraceptive use left censors the data, but this does not influence the substantive findings presented below. Analyses using a sample of women under 20 in 1996, for whom there is virtually no previous contraceptive use, are similar to those presented here. Also, using a sample that includes women with previous contraceptive use I found that interaction terms between the respondent’s attitudes and previous contraceptive use were not statistically significant, implying that the effect of the attitudes does not depend on previous use and that left censoring does not possess a serious threat to my conclusions.

  5. Because I use event history methods to model contraceptive use I am able to include women who were not married at 1996, but marry during the prospective data collection period.

  6. This variable also codes a woman who reported using an “other” contraceptive method as using. This is different from reporting abstinence which is reported separately and not included in this dependent variable.

  7. I estimated models excluding husband’s sterilization and found substantively similar results to those shown here.

  8. I also tested models that include measures of the respondent’s attitudes toward specific contraceptive methods. Respondents were asked whether each method was accessible, effective in preventing pregnancy, or had unpleasant side effects. I explored a range of measures including individual measures and indexes of accessibility, effectiveness, and side effects. There were some significant effects, but including these measures did not change the substantive effects shown in the tables and I exclude them here for parsimony.

  9. Groups refers to community based groups focusing on issues including women’s issues, seed dispersion, micro-loans, and social groups.

  10. I present measures referring to age 12 in the paper because the data include specific questions about the respondent’s neighborhood at that time. However, since this is a relatively arbitrary cut off I tested measures of the respondent’s experiences at age 10 and age 15 and found virtually the same findings as those presented here.

  11. I also explored measures of the respondent’s religiosity. The importance of religion and the frequency the respondent prays at home were not statistically related to the hazard of fertility limitation. They are excluded here for parsimony.

  12. Because individual interviews were conducted between June and December of 1996 and the prospective data collection began for everyone in February 1997, the first “month” of the prospective data collection may have occurred as many as 7 months and as little as 2 months after the attitudes were measured. At the February 1997 interview, respondents were asked about their contraceptive use between the date of their individual interview and February 1997. As a result, this first “month” refers to different time frames for different respondents. I include a control equal to one for the person-months that correspond with this first period in the data collection. This control is included in all the models presented in this paper.

  13. Creating multiple person-months of data for each person to use in discrete-time hazard models is not equivalent to inflating the sample size. That is, this approach does not artificially deflate standard errors (Allison 1982, 1984; Petersen 1986, 1991). The estimated standard errors are consistent estimators of the true standard errors (Allison 1982: 82).

  14. Because my theoretical framework leads to directional hypotheses (e.g., women who disagree that it is better to have many children than to be rich will have higher contraceptive use rates) I employ one-tailed statistical significance tests.

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Acknowledgments

This project was supported by several sources: Award Number R01HD032912 and a training Grant (NIH/NRSA T32 HD07168) both from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health & Human Development, the Population Studies Center at the University of Michigan, and the Carolina Population Center at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I thank William Axinn, Jennifer Barber, Susan Murphy, Arland Thornton, and participants in the CPC Postdoc work group for comments on earlier versions and the staff of the Institute for Social and Environmental Research, Chitwan, Nepal, for their assistance in data collection. Any errors are the responsibility of the author. This research does not necessarily represent the official views of the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health & Human Development or the National Institutes of Health. Direct correspondence to Sarah R. Brauner-Otto, Department of Sociology, Mississippi State University, Mississippi State, MS 39762; email: sbrauner-otto@soc.msstate.edu.

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Brauner-Otto, S.R. Attitudes About Children and Fertility Limitation Behavior. Popul Res Policy Rev 32, 1–24 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11113-012-9261-6

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