Social Dynamics of Adolescent Fertility in Sub-Saharan Africa (1993) / Chapter Skim
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APPENDIX: DIFFICULTIES IN ANALYZING ADOLSCENT FERTILITY
APPENDIX: DIFFICULTIES IN ANALYZING ADOLSCENT FERTILITY
Pages 178-184
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From page 178... ...
In locales where adult work and marriage begin early, a realistic analysis must include individuals as young as 12 or even 10. In sharp contrast are the areas, usually urban, where education ends late and childbearing begins late; here, an analysis that excludes 20- to 24-year-olds misses considerable information.
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From page 179... ...
Are the high risks of morbidity and mortality to be interpreted as "natural" consequences of the mother's physical immaturity, or do many of these risks stem from the condemnation that makes young women forgo prenatal care or attempt abortion? DEFINITION OF MARRIAGE The key transitions surrounding adolescence pose some of the most significant problems of definitional ambiguities.
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From page 180... ...
Taken together, these complications make it difficult to draw reliable inferences about the association between marital status and fertility. What they do suggest is that increases in premarital sexual experience and childbearing in such contexts stem not so much from changes in actual rates of childbearing, or even from increases in sexual experience during the adolescent years; rather, they stem from the possibility that young women in certain kinds of unions or stages in the conjugal process are now less inclined to claim that they are married.
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From page 181... ...
Such gaps develop because reliable data on almost any topic that has been critical to the interpretation of the demographic transition in Europe are historically shallow for Africa; they develop also because not all current national studies cover the key variables in the same way. Large-scale population data sets are not usually set up to support the kinds of points that small-scale ethnographic studies make best.
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From page 182... ...
With all its shortcomings, the DHS is far more comprehensive than other major sources, as well as more recent, and so we rely heavily on it. INTEGRATION OF DATA SOURCES Because the sources on which we depend vary widely in coverage of topics about adolescence and fertility, we face the task of integrating a number of different types of data: national-level data for female labor force participation from International Labour Office materials, regional and national data on fertility from the Demographic and Health Surveys, data on religion or social class, and information on cultural and social practices based largely on individual ethnographic studies of ethnic or subethnic groups.
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From page 183... ...
Many of the demographic data have been collected not by the cultural area or the ethnicity framework, but with reference to political boundaries of nations and their constituent administrative units that colonial states defined. Only for some DHS countries, for example, can one isolate specifically ethnic categories of the population, because this variable was coded or because there is a close match between the ethnic and the administrative boundaries.
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From page 184... ...
The term "modern" presents the opposite problem: It is often applied freely to patterns that are assumed to reflect the effects of wage labor, export crop production, conversion to world religions, and the spread of formal education, yet may in fact have their origin in the unfolding of trends that predated the introduction of these factors. Although these problems are to some extent irresolvable, we define our terms as carefully as possible.
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