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Adapting the Own Children Method to allow comparison of fertility between populations with different marriage regimes.

Accepted version
Peer-reviewed

Type

Article

Change log

Abstract

The Own Children Method (OCM) is an indirect procedure for deriving age-specific fertility rates and total fertility from children living with their mothers at a census or survey. The method was designed primarily for the calculation of overall fertility, although there are variants that allow the calculation of marital fertility. In this paper we argue that the standard variants for calculating marital fertility can produce misleading results and require strong assumptions, particularly when applied to social or spatial subgroups. We present two new variants of the method for calculating marital fertility: the first of these allows for the presence of non-marital fertility and the second also permits the more robust calculation of rates for social subgroups of the population. We illustrate and test these using full-count census data for England and Wales in 1911.

Description

Keywords

England and Wales, Own Children Method, age-specific fertility rate, census, estimation, fertility, historical demography, marital fertility, total fertility, Adolescent, Adult, Birth Rate, Data Collection, England, Family Characteristics, Female, History, 20th Century, Humans, Marriage, Middle Aged, Wales, Young Adult

Journal Title

Popul Stud (Camb)

Conference Name

Journal ISSN

0032-4728
1477-4747

Volume Title

74

Publisher

Informa UK Limited

Rights

All rights reserved
Sponsorship
Economic and Social Research Council (ES/L015463/1)
Isaac Newton Trust (16.38(I))