Family-Level Continuities in Childbearing in Low-Fertility Societies

TLDR: This article found that the relationship between successive generations is becoming stronger with time, and that it is now of a comparable order of magnitude to widely-used conventional covariates such as educational level.

Abstract: A number of studies of populations in earlier generations haveshown that fertility patterns of parents and children arepositively correlated, although the relationship is frequentlydesignated as `weak'. Models that may be used to investigate theways in which patterns of demographic behaviour persist betweengenerations are considered. The principal frameworks used arefitting of simulation and multi-level models. The data sourcesutilised are the 1986 ISSP co-ordinated series of surveys onsocial networks, the country files for Italy, Norway and Polandfrom the UNECE co-ordinated FFS programme, and the US NationalSurvey of Families and Households which contains particularlyrich information on the experience of demographic events acrossdifferent generations. We find that the relationship betweenfertility of successive generations is becoming stronger withtime, and that it is now of a comparable order of magnitude towidely-used conventional covariates such as educational level. This intergenerational relationship cannot be explained bydifferential fertility across socio-economic groups. Reasons whythe strength of the relationship has been understated and theimplications of results from such analyses are discussed.