Back to home pageUnited Kingdom (London) POPULATION STUDIES NOVEMBER 1992 - VOLUME 46, NUMBER 3 93.58.01 - English - John C. CALDWELL, Pat CALDWELL, Health Transition Centre, Australian National University, G.P.O. Box 4, Canberra, ACT 2601 (Australy), and I.O. ORUBULOYE, Faculty of The Social Sciences, Ondo State University, Ado-Ekiti (Nigeria) The Family and Sexual Networking in Sub-Saharan Africa: Historical (p. 385-410) Regional Differences and Present-day Implications The geographical pattern of the AIDS epidemic in sub-Saharan Africa suggests the possibility of different historical patterns. Because sexual behaviour is inadequately reported by the oral tradition, this paper concentrates on 19th-century contemporary accounts and 20th-century reconstructions with the older population. It relates sexual behaviour to other aspects of the societies. The findings are tested against theoretical generalizations, including Gluckman's identification of faher- right societies and conclusions reached by the authors from a study of change in the Ekiti District of Nigeria. Finally, the impact of colonization in destabilizing the historical patterns of sexual networking is examined. The conclusion is reached that there has been sufficient convergence in patterns of sexual networking to render it improbable that the historical patterns determine the contemporary distribution of AIDS, although they may influence patterns of the post-partum duration of sexual abstinence and of the acceptance of family planning by level and type. (AFRICA SOUTH OF SAHARA, NIGERIA, AIDS, FAMILY, SEXUAL BEHAVIOUR) 93.58.02 - English - A.R. THATCHER, 129 Thetford Road, New Malden, Surrey KT3 5DS (U.K.) Trends in Numbers and Mortality at High Ages in England and Wales (p. 411-426) In the paper new estimates of the numbers of deaths and death rates at ages 80 and overin England and Wales are derived for the period 1911-90. These estimates were made by applying the methods of extinct generations and reverse survival to data on deaths in 1911-90, and pensioners in 1990. Estimates are given for individual years of age. It is found that death rates at these high ages have been falling, slowly, for the last 50 years. The paper also gives information on the highest ages at death which have been recorded and verified. (UNITED KINGDOM, AGED, AGEING) 93.58.03 - English - Ann BOWMAN JANNETTA, Department of History, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburg, Kansas 66762 (U.S.A.) Famine Mortality in 19th-Century Japan: The Evidence from a Temple Death Register (p. 427-443) Economic and demographic historians who have studied Japan's early modern period argue that preventive checks to fertility were the primary cause of Japan's stationary population in the 18th and early 19th centuries, and that the role of "positive" checks was negligible. This paper presents evidence and a claim that mortality crises - famines in particular - also played an important role in checking population growth during this period. It analyses data from the death register of Ogen-ji, a Buddhist temple in the Hida region of central Japan. These data provide a remarkably detailed picture of the short-term demographic consequences of Japan's last great famine, the Tenpo famine of the 1830s. "Normal" mortality patterns, by age and sex, are compared with patterns of mortality during the famine. Mortality of males rose considerably more than that of females, with the greatest rise occurring among young boys aged 5-14 and adult men aged 30- 59. A surprising finding was that mortality at ages 0-4 rose relatively little, in part a consequence of a marked fall in the number of births during the famine. The Tenpo subsistence crisis was not the sole cause of population stagnation in the Ogen-ji population, but it was a prominent feature of the "high mortality regime" that this population experienced during the 18th and 19th centuries. (JAPAN, MORTALITY, FOOD SHORTAGE, HISTORICAL DEMOGRAPHY) 93.58.04 - English - Warren C. ROBINSON, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Pennsylvania 16802 (U.S.A.) Kenya Enters the Fertility Transition (p. 445-457) Contraceptive prevalence is rising and fertility is falling in Kenya, and the speed with which these changes are occurring suggests that Kenya has passed a turning point and entered a transition. In this paper the author explores these rencent trends with data from the 1989 Kenya Demographic Health Survey and several other small-scale surveys and qualitative research studies. Underlying the changed contraceptive - fertility behaviour, there appears to have been a major shift in attitudes regarding desired family size. In the second part of the paper the earlier almost universally pessimistic predictions regarding fertility in Kenya, which now appear to have been wrong are considered. Since Kenya has emerged as a bellwether among sub-saharan African states, these earlier predictions are re-examined with a view to learning from their mistakes. It is concluded that incorrect theoretical paradigms and assumptions led to the erroneous results, rather more than incorrect data, or analysis. (KENYA, AFRICA SOUTH OF SAHARA, CONTRACEPTION, FERTILITY, DEMOGRAPHIC TRANSITION) 93.58.05 - English - Oystein KRAVDAL, Research Department, Central Bureau of Statistics, P.B. 8131, Dep., 0033 Oslo 1 (Norway) The Emergence of a Positive Relation between Education and Third Birth Rates in Norway with Supportive Evidence from the United States (p. 459-475) Data derived from the Central Population Register of Norway and the 1988 National Survey of Families and Households show a positive association between mothers' educational level and rates of third births. Norwegian women who had a second birth during the late 1970s and had received more than 12 years of schooling gave birth to a third child more frequently than women who had only received the minimum compulsory education. Similar results were obtained for American women who had a second birth during the 1970s. Attempts to explain this positive effect of education in terms of economic status, or a differential impact of commitment to work by the mothers, have failed. It also seems that trends and variations in selection to parity 2 play a minor role. (NORWAY, UNITED STATES, FERTILITY, PARITY, EDUCATION OF WOMEN) 93.58.06 - English - William SANDER, Department of Economics, DePaul University, Chicago, Illinois 60604 (U.S.A.) Caatholicism and the Economics of Fertility (p. 477-489) The economic approach to fertility is an application of the economic theory of consumer behaviour. It is assumed that utility- maximizing decisions regarding children are affected by explicit and implicit prices and income. One of the criticisms of this approach is that social norms tend to be given short shrift. In this paper, we examine the effet of Catholicism on fertility in the United States. Several new findings are presented. Most importantly, it is shown that many studies on Catholicism are flawed because of sample selection bias, which arises because ex- Catholics prefer smaller families than non-Catholics. We also show that religious activity has no effect on fertility if it is treated as an endogenous variable. Further, it is shown that the fertility transition in the United States is partly related to the changing effect of Catholic norms. (UNITED STATES, RELIGION, CATHOLICISM, DEMOGRAPHIC TRANSITION) 93.58.07 - English - Daniel C. CLAY and Nan E. JOHNSON, Department of Sociology, Michigan University, East Lansing, Michigan 48824-1111 (U.S.A.) Size of Farm or Size of Family: Which Comes First? (p. 491-505) Efforts to control rampant population growth in sub-Saharan Africa have been stymied by confusion between the potential causes and consequences of high fertility in the region. A controversy has surfaced over the causal direction of the fundamental relationship between human fertility and size of landholdings. Members of one school of thought claim that farm couples modify their fertility behaviour to the amount of land they own or operate. Yet others argue that the size of landholdings varies as a function of family size (an indicator of the availability of family labour). In the present study we use a two-stage least-squares regression on data from a 1988 survey of 747 farm households in Rwanda to disaggregate and compare the strengths of these two possible paths of influence. The results show that landholdings exert a positive influence on human reproduction, but not the reverse. Moreover, this influence is slightly stronger for couples who own all the land they operated, probably because they have larger incomes from equity in the land. The size of the farm is unrelated to the size of the family's potential farm labour force (measured as the number of household members aged 15-65) or to the husband's total desired number of children. These findings suggest that farm size boosts the number of living children not by creating a demand for more children but by increasing the supply of children through higher natural fertility and child survival. (RWANDA, AFRICA SOUTH OF SAHARA, FERTILITY, FARMERS) 93.58.08 - English - Steven RUGGLES, Department of History, University of Minnesota, 614 Social Sciences Building, 267 19th Avenue South, Minneapolis, MN 55455 (U.S.A.) Migration, Marriage, and Mortality: Correcting Sources of Bias in English Family Reconstitutions (p. 507-522) Family reconstitution studies assess demographic behaviour for that section of the population that remains in the parish of their birth. Although there has been considerable discussion of whether or not these non-migrants are representative of the population as a whole, the distorting effects of migration censoring have not been adequately considered. This paper shows that even when the demographic behaviour of non-migrants is identical to that of the general population, migration-censoring will significantly bias family reconstituion results. In particular, existing family reconstitution studies underestimate both age at marriage and life expectancy. The paper assesses the potential magnitude of bias introduced by migration, and suggests several new techniques for correcting the errors. (UNITED KINGDOM, INTERNAL MIGRATION, FAMILY RECONSTITUTION) 93.58.09 - English - Michael WINTLE, Department of European Studies, University of Hull, Cottingham Road, Hull HU6 7RX (U.K.) Push-factors in Emigration: The Case of the Province of Zeeland in the 19th Century (p. 523-537) Despite a low emigration rate compared to other European countries in the last century, Dutch emigration has been well studied, mainly because of the very fine state of the records. This paper seeks to contribute to general issues in emigration by considering data from a limited but important area, the province of Zeeland in the Netherlands, which was one of the principal contributors to Dutch emigration to North America during the 19th century. The subject-matter is the motivation of those emigrants, and the analysis concentrates on factors in the place of origin. "Pull- factors" that attract emigrants to their destinations are acknowledged to be important, but are not studied here; a wide range of social, economic, and political variables in Zeeland are computed. Two sets of factors are found to govern the "push": the first are deprivation factors, such as epidemics, bad harvests, poverty, and persecution. At the same time, it is posited that many emigrants left for precisely the opposite reason: that things were going well in the home country. Besides revealing something of the migration process itself, this approach has the advantage of increasing our understanding of the country of origin or "push- area", where other sources may be incomplete or ambiguous. (NETHERLANDS, INTERNATIONAL MIGRATION, HISTORICAL DEMOGRAPHY)
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