Preliminary Programme

Since the second half of the 19th century most Western and Asian societies have gone through the fertility transition, the shift from high to low fertility. A longstanding, unresolved debate has developed about whether this decline was caused by ‘spacing’ (increasing the time between births) or by ‘stopping’ (terminating childbearing at younger ages). Recently, the same debate has re-emerged concerning the fertility transition in sub-Saharan Africa, which has been described as ‘a new type of transition’ characterized by the use of modern contraceptives by women who still want large families and by ‘postponement’ of childbearing as a response to uncertain external conditions, such as housing shortages, income drops, and marriage problems. By now, the debate has reached a dead-end because of disagreement about the methods to detect fertility control. While most prior studies have focused on single markers of fertility control, such as spacing and stopping, we use an empirical approach based on the life course perspective that allows us to understand (changes in) fertility behaviour over women’s entire reproductive lifespans (age 15-45). ‘Holistic’ reproductive trajectories not only capture reproductive dynamics taking place over more extended periods of (life) time but also ensure a better examination of the endogenous causality of reproductive events and of the actual practiced reproductive control. Using sequence and cluster analysis we identify different types of reproductive trajectories incorporating, besides fertility, also marriage behaviour, and other forms of reproductive management, such as abortions. Trajectories are explained by exploiting multilevel logistic models capturing structural, ideational/cultural, and social-interactional variables. We base our analysis on longitudinal micro data from a health and demographic surveillance system in Niakhar region, Senegal that has been in place since the early 1960s. (Show less)

Little is known about the fertility transition in insular Greece because of the lack of reliable and intermittent time series of vital statistics. This lack of data is partly due to the fact that different groups of islands were annexed to Greece in different time periods. This paper tries to overcome the obstacle of data scarcity by applying methods used mainly in historical demography (such as the Coale’s indexes of fertility) and by indirectly estimating demographic indexes (such as Total Fertility Rate and Total Marital Fertility Rate) by census returns. A substantial finding is that from 1920 to the end of the 1970s the islands in the South Aegean (the Cyclades and the Dodecanese) were recording higher fertility than Greece, while those in the North Aegean lower. Different levels of birth control were not the only reason behind the different fertility levels of South and North Aegean islands. Marriage patterns also played a role in the differential fertility in the two edges of the Aegean.
However, since the 1980s both marriage patterns and fertility behavior are converging, thus bringing all groups of islands to similar fertility levels with Greece. The islands today record a slightly higher fertility than the national average, and lower mean age of women at their first child. Nevertheless, both in mainland Greece and in the Aegean islands the mean female age at first marriage in 2016 was higher than the mean age of mother at her first child implying that for many women first birth precedes marriage. This is the case for every group of islands that is examined (the Cyclades, the Dodecanese and the North Aegean islands). However, the North Aegean is more conservative as far as the procreative ethics are concerned since out of wedlock childbearing is less common in the North Aegean islands (only 5.7% of all birth come from unwed mothers) than in the Dodecanese (9%) or in Greece (8.6%) in recent years. (Show less)