Rival Explanations in the Work--Fertility Relationship

Abstract

Summary Previous research has clearly established that for most populations at most periods, the relationship between fertility and female employment is significantly negative. It has also established that this relationship may be partly due to the influence of other characteristics which influence both fertility and employment behaviour. However, the true extent to which other characteristics influence the work-fertility relationship is blurred (a) because many reports do not include information concerning both the relationship before and after other influences are controlled, and (b) because the influences which are controlled differ from report to report. These influential social characteristics are simultaneously controlled in an analysis of women interviewed in the 1960 Growth of American Families Survey who had normal fecundity. The characteristics within marriage and in the backgrounds of the husband and of the wife are: Catholic devoutness, residence, and socio-economic status. Also controlled are: duration of marriage, marital separation, timing of marriage in relation to parenthood, wife's cohort, and wife's education (before and within marriage). In nine tests, including longitudinal and racially specific ones, the control of other characteristics eliminates the total relationship between work and fertility for one, changes it to a significantly positive relationship in two, and greatly reduces its significance in the remaining six. A complete assessment of the influences of these characteristics upon the work-fertility relationship is not possible with these data because measurement problems exist for several of the characteristics considered. That is, such variables account for more of the work-fertility relationship than can be reported here, but the amount of that increase is presently inestimable.

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 — 18 citations exist upstream.

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