Own‐Choice Marriage and Fertility in Turkey

Abstract

Goode’s foundational work on the fertility transition identified own-choice marriage as a factor driving fertility decline, part of a widening repertoire of choice pertaining to marriage and childbearing. Yet research supporting this connection in today’s transitional societies is scarce and somewhat contradictory, and it is unclear how other marital traditions, such as consanguineous marriage, shape this relationship. This study evaluates Goode’s theorized connection using pooled Demographic and Health Survey data from Turkey, comparing children ever born, use of contraception, and parity progression across four types of marriage: own-choice and arranged marriage; and marriage to a cousin versus an unrelated spouse. Results are largely consistent with the idea that a move towards own-choice marriage reflects a widening repertoire of choice that also leads to fertility decline. However, they also show that hybrid models like own-choice marriage to a cousin tempers these effects.

Fertility Patterns Among Turkish Women in Turkey and Abroad: The Effects of International Mobility, Migrant Generation, and Family Background

“…Hence, as measured here, the effect of the family of origin on fertility does not seem to be very strong. This finding contradicts earlier evidence from other studies on non-migrant populations (Tunc ¸bilek and Koc ¸1994; Murphy and Wang 2001;Steenhof and Liefbroer 2008;Rijken and Liefbroer 2009;Kolk 2014;Manglos-Weber and Weinreb 2016). Finally, we found that controlling for family background factors and individual socio-demographic characteristics hardly helped to explain the observed fertility differences between the migrants and the stayers.…”