A mixed effects model of birth spacing for pre-transition populations

Abstract

It has often been argued that there are good theoretical and historical reasons to expect that deliberate birth spacing has played an important role in fertility patterns before the demographic transition. Yet, it has proved difficult to find hard empirical evidence. In this article, we propose a new model of the speed of parity progression that includes both fixed and random effects and that efficiently captures unobserved heterogeneity between couples in fecundability and postpartum amenorrhea. With this model, we demonstrate that pre-transition couples in the Netherlands indeed spaced their births during about the first ten years of marriage. In addition, we have found strong differentials in birth intervals by socio-economic position and religion. Finally, we also show how and why the model can be used with left-censored census data.

Mortality decline and reproductive change during the Dutch demographic transition

“…Its impact on stopping and spacing behavior has, however, seldom been studied (Kok and Van Bavel 2006;Van Bavel and Kok 2005;Van Bavel and Kok 2010). By using a scheme in which the presence of doctrines or values that stimulate high fertility and the presence of institutional means of communicating these doctrines or values were the key elements, Kok and Van Bavel (2006) were able to place the major religious groups in the Netherlands into three categories: Roman Catholics, Liberal Protestants, and Orthodox Protestants.…”

Gender and fertility within the free churches in the Sundsvall region, Sweden, 1860–1921

“…However most, implicitly or explicitly, refer to some form of de-Christianization on a personal or societal level -a process that results in making fertility control conceivable (Gauvreau, 2006;Kok & Van Bavel, 2006;Praz, 2006b;Schellekens & Poppel, 2006). Yet the existence of pre-transitional fertility control has been shown empirically (Bengtsson & Dribe, 2006;Kolk, 2011;Reher & Sandström, 2015;Sandström & Vikström, 2015;Van Bavel, 2004b;Van Bavel & Kok, 2010), thus problematizing the dichotomous view of the fertility transition as a shift from "natural" fertility without deliberate fertility control, only regulated by Malthusian preventive checks (Malthus, 1926), to controlled fertility as defined by Henry (1961).…”

Historical reproductive patterns in developed countries: Aggregate-level perspective

“…The relationships between mortality and fertility and between nuptiality and mortality may have been adaptation mechanisms used by societies in historical times to regulate population growth. Many studies in historical demography using micro-level data after the Princeton Project have demonstrated replacement of deceased children with individual fertility life-course data (Bengtsson and Dribe 2006;Knodel 1988;van Bavel 2003van Bavel , 2004Reher and SanzGimeno 2007;van Bavel and Kok 2010;van Poppel et al 2012;Reher and Sandström 2015;Reher et al 2017).…”

“…They show that couples that lost a child had a higher probability of having another child. Van Bavel and Kok (2010), using three elaborate family reconstructions covering two provinces of the Netherlands in the period 1825-1885, find that pretransition couples indeed spaced their births during roughly the first ten years of marriage. Bengtsson and Dribe (2006), using survival analysis on a longitudinal dataset at the individual level combined with food prices, also find that families in a rural population in Sweden controlled the timing of childbirth before the fertility transition.…”

“…One consequence of the disappointing results obtained by the Princeton European Fertility Project was precisely that over the following decades there was a genuine explosion in studies using individual longitudinal data obtained by family reconstruction techniques (Alter 1988;Bengtsson and Dribe 2006;Knodel 1988;van Bavel 2003van Bavel , 2004Reher and Sanz-Gimeno 2007;van Bavel and Kok 2010;Reher et al 2017).…”