Fertility, union status and partners.

Abstract

A cross-cultural study of the effects of several aspects of marriage and kinship institutions on fertility through their influence on intermediate variables is presented. The study focuses on nonindustrial societies where modern contraceptives are not generally used. Relevant anthropological sociological and demographic literature is studied. The relationship between fertility and the following aspects of marriage is discussed: 1) types of union i.e. legal common-law and visiting; 2) family type i.e. extended or nuclear; 3) nature of descent group i.e. corporate unilinear or not; and 4) form of marriage i.e. monogamous or polygamous. Difficulties with and limitations of these studies are discussed. Results of the fertility-form of marriage studies are contradictory and inconclusive; evidence is that polygynously married women have lower fertility than monogamously married women. Fertility is lowest in unions of highest instabilty. All of these aspects of marriage are found to be affected by as well as to affect fertility.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 9 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.