No abstract

Attitudes towards sexual minorities have undergone a transformation in Western countries recently. This has led to an increase in research into the experiences of sexual minorities in a variety of life domains. Although parenthood is a valued life goal only a few small-scale studies have looked into the parenthood goals of individuals in relation to their sexual orientation. The aims of this study are to analyse the diversity of sexual orientation, the factors associated with it and the relationship to fertility intentions among adolescents aged 16 to 19. The study draws on a nationally representative youth survey conducted in 2020 in Estonia (N = 1624), and employs descriptive methods and logistic and linear regression models. The results show that adolescents in Estonia exhibit considerable diversity of sexual orientation, with one-fifth reporting some degree of attraction to their own sex. The minority sexual orientation is more frequent among groups which can be regarded as more open or exposed to new behaviours, but is also associated with a disadvantaged family background. The results reveal a clear negative association between the intended number of children and the minority sexual orientation, which is not explained by other available variables.

BACKGROUND From a historical perspective, the transition from a pre-industrial to a modern society is associated with increasing social status heterogamy. As individuals' acquired characteristics became more important for partner selection than inherited class status, the importance of status homogamy declined and marrying outside one's own social group became more frequent. OBJECTIVE We investigate educational heterogamy in a university town at the end of the 19 th century. We ask whether marriage of unequally educated partners is related to dissimilarity in the partners' other characteristics. Ethnic background, origin (place of birth), and age difference between the spouses are considered as characteristics that may associate with sorting into educationally heterogamous unions. METHODS The analysis uses data from the 1897 census in Tartu. Using logistic regression modelling, we estimate how age difference, origin heterogamy, and ethnic heterogamy of the spouses associate with educational heterogamy. RESULTS The results indicate a positive relationship between educational heterogamy and marrying outside one's own ethnic or origin group, but no effect for spousal age difference.

The topic of socio-economic fertility differences and its causes during the demographic transition has received a significant amount of attention in historical demography. With few exceptions, however, the previous studies have dealt with Western Europe. This paper increases the geographic range of the literature and investigates the influence of socioeconomic status on marital fertility in an urban population of Tartu, a mid-sized university town in Estonia. Unlike previous studies, we perform both a cross-sectional analysisusing census data to analyse net marital fertilityand event history analysisusing linked-records sample to analyse the probability of next birth after the census. We measure socio-economic status based on the husband's occupation, but also include information on the level of her education, employment and migration status. In line with the literature, our results confirm that women belonging to the highest social group to have considerably lower marital fertility in the early phase of transition. However, there is no linear social gradient in fertility in Tartu.Instead, we find women married to professionals and skilled workers to have higher fertility, whereas low fertility is exhibited also by women married to men working in the low-wage service sector. We fail to find any support that the educational level of the woman was differentiating fertility in the late nineteenth century Tartu. We relate these patterns in fertility to both adjustment to structural forces as well as innovation and diffusion of new demographic behaviour experienced by the local urban population during the fertility transition.

In 1923, the first referendum of Estonia-one of the most secular countries in the world-was held. It came about as a public initiative to reinstate religious studies as a subject in public elementary schools after it had been banned by left-dominated parliaments. The referendum underlined the schism between the political elite and the wider population regarding the societal role of religion, with only 28.8 percent of votes cast in opposition to the proposal. This article uses opposition to religious studies as a proxy for secularization, and asks which political, cultural, demographic, and economic factors influenced people to become secularized in an early phase of the process. The analysis is done using municipal-level results of the referendum and standard linear, as well as two spatial models. It is shown that left-wing political preference and male sex are the most important predictors of secularization.