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For most European countries the timing of first marriage and first parenthood are no longer the only and most appropriate indicators of the transition from youth to adulthood. This is so because both events were not only postponed, they also became increasingly disconnected from age and from each other. Moreover, among the female post-war cohorts there was a growing inter-dependence between the occupational and family career. These were good reasons to broaden the study of the transition from youth to adulthood.In the previous chapters, we have seen how the post-war cohorts made their transitions from youth to adulthood along various socio-demographic events in ten European countries. In Chapter 1, reference was made to the fact that some events making up the transition to adulthood are elements constituting the Second Demographic Transition (SDT). In order to summarise the discussion, it will be helpful therefore to position the countries on a SDT continuum. To this end, Liefbroer (1998) used four indicators of the changes constituting the second demographic transition: the total fertility rate (TFR), the total first marriage rate, the percentage of out-of-wedlock births (as a proxy for the spread of non-marital married cohabitation) and the total divorce rate. Using these data for nine countries involved in our studyno comparable data were available for Polandand applying principal compo-313 M. Corijn and E. Klijzing (eds.), Transitions to Adulthood in Europe, 313-340.

Data on unmet need, supplemented with information on induced abortion and related issues, could provide countries in Europe with useful inputs for formulating and implementing responsive reproductive health policies and programs.

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Numerous studies have found a negative relationship between female labour-force participation and fertility. In theory, there could be three explanations of this finding: (i) causality runs from labour-force participation to fertility, (ii) causality runs from fertility to labour-force participation, (iii) causality runs both ways. Alternatively, the relationship may not be a causal one. In practice, empirical studies covering a wide range of Western countries at different times, and utilizing a great variety of methods and techniques, have shown all four possibilities to be plausible. This may be because outcomes differ from country to country for socio-cultural reasons, or from period to period for historical ones. If so, applying various methodologies to data for one country at a particular point in time should yield consistent results that all point in one direction only. If they did not outcomes would appear to be method-dependent. The single data set used in this study refers to the Netherlands in 1984 (ORIN project). The relationship between fertility and labour-force participation in this data set is investigated by means of three methodologies, ranging from 'static' to 'dynamic', i.e., E. Klijzing et at. / Female labour force participation and fertilitydiffering according to the degree in which they take the temporal aspects of the decision-making process underlying this relationship into account: simultaneous logit analysis, Granger analysis and Markov analysis. Each main approach is applied in two different ways or on two different subgroups, for a total of six applications. In spite of diverging operationalizations of the basic variables, it turns out that four of these six analyses favour the inference that fertility decisions do have an impact on labour force participation decisions but not the other way around, whereas the other two confirm earlier findings (from data sets collected during the 1970s) that the relationship is reciprocal. Substantively, this might indicate that the pattern of covariance is changing. But 'static' simultaneous togit analysis is the only method to consistently point at this causal unidirectionality, while outcomes from Granger and Markov analysis depend on the modality applied. Methodologically, this means that the issue of method-dependency, at least in this area, remains largely unresolved. Rdsumd. L'analyse statique oppos~e ~ l'analyse dynamique de l'interaction entre la participation au march$ du travail fdminin et la f~conditdDe nombreuses 6tudes ont montr6 une relation ntgative entre la participation au march6 du travail ftminin et la f~conditt. ThEoriquement il peut y avoir trois explications possibles ~ce r&ultat: (1) la participation au marchE du travail influe sur la fdconditE, (2) la ftcondit6 influe sur la participation au marchE du travail, (3) i'influence peut ~tre rtciproque. I1 est m~me possible que la relation ne soit pas causale. Pratiquement, les ~tudes empiriques qui couvrent un large 6ventail de pays dtveloppts difftrentes @oques et qui utilisent un...