The demography of words: The global decline in non-numeric fertility preferences, 1993-2011

Abstract

This paper examines the decline in non-numeric responses to questions about fertility preferences among women in the developing world. These types of response-such as 'don't know' or 'it's up to God'-have often been interpreted through the lens of fertility transition theory as an indication that reproduction has not yet entered women's 'calculus of conscious choice'. However, this has yet to be investigated cross-nationally and over time. Using 19 years of data from 32 countries, we find that non-numeric fertility preferences decline most substantially in the early stages of a country's fertility transition. Using country-specific and multilevel models, we explore the individual- and contextual-level characteristics associated with women's likelihood of providing a non-numeric response to questions about their fertility preferences. Non-numeric fertility preferences are influenced by a host of social factors, with educational attainment and knowledge of contraception being the most robust and consistent predictors.

Keywords: fertility preferences; fertility transitions; non-numeric responses.

Figure 1

Scatterplot of proportion of women providing a non-numeric response to the ideal family size question against year of survey. Source: DHS implementing partners and ICF International. Demographic and Health Surveys 1993–2011. Notes: Each dot represents one of the 91 DHS surveys included in our sample. Proportions are weighted to adjust for regional variation in sampling within countries. Surveys conducted in sub-Saharan Africa appear in the left-hand panel, and surveys conducted in Asia (black) and Latin America (blue) appear in the right-hand panel. Linear regression lines were calculated separately for each world region.

Figure 2

Scatterplot of proportion of women providing a non-numeric response to the ideal family size question against total fertility rate for the year during which the majority of respondents were surveyed. Source: As for Figure 1. Notes: The two outlying points in the upper left corner are from Indonesia, which has unusually high levels of non-numeric response considering its fertility profile (see also Figure 3).

Figure 3

Connected lines showing the proportion of women providing a non-numeric response to ideal family size against total fertility rate for each country, differentiated according to patterns in total fertility rate during the window of observation. Source: As for Figure 1. Note: Total fertility rates declined throughout the period of observation for all countries in our sample, so all lines can be read from left (higher TFR) to right (lower TFR) over time.

Figure 4

Percent of women who provide non-numeric IFS against year of observation, differentiated according to the onset of the country’s fertility transition. Source: As for Figure 1. Notes: Onset of the fertility transition is defined as the year in which a country experienced a net decline in TFR of more than 10 percent compared to its 1960 value. Information about TFR is sourced from the World Indicators Database. For more information about each country’s year of onset of the fertility transition, see Table 1. Average slopes of lines: −0.23 for Panel 1, −0.10 for Panel 2, −0.54 for Panel 3, and −0.05 for Panel 4.

Figure 5

Country-level effects and total contextual effects (combining country- and survey-levels) from a multilevel logistic regression model predicting non-numeric response. Source: As for Figure 1. Notes: The dots represent the country-level effects, estimated using posterior means of the random intercepts for each country. Positive values (e.g., Cameroon, Indonesia) indicate that a country has higher levels of non-numeric IFS than would be predicted given observed values for all individual- and survey-level variables. Values that are significantly different from 0 at a 95% level of confidence are displayed with filled circles, while values that are not statistically significant are displayed with open circles. The printed years represent the combined country- and survey-level effects, or the posterior intercepts for levels 2 and 3. They represent the total group-level variation included in the model. When compared to country-level effects, these values show the additional variation captured at the survey level. The labels are centered around the data points, so the precise estimate is between the 2^nd and 3^rd digits of each year. Values that are significantly different from 0 at a 95% level of confidence are printed in bold italic.