Suchergebnisse

Abstract Participation in rural development programs that organize members into local cooperative groups can alter the decision‐making environment facing couples to reflect some of the negative consequences of childbearing. This study uses data from Nepal, collected through a combination of ethnographic and survey methods, to test the effects of participation in such a development program on fertility behavior. Results demonstrate that program participants are much more likely to use contraceptives to limit their fertility than are non‐participants. The study provides empirical support for theories linking this type of institutional change to fertility and indicates a policy option that can allow some negative consequences of childbearing to affect couples' fertility decisions.

Abstract Recent research in many areas of social demography has begun to address the implications of cultural, social, and economic context for individual–level preferences and behavior. We expand on this theme by arguing that multiple levels of context may simultaneously direct individual–level strategies. We focus on the relationship between women's natal kin ties and their demand for children, a substantive area in which context is thought to be particularly important. We use a combination of ethnographic and survey data to measure contextual characteristics, women's ties to their natal families, and couples' fertility preferences and behavior. Our results demonstrate that particularly supportive relationships with natal kin have more influence on fertility preferences and behavior than contact with natal kin, although both dimensions are important. The results also show that even within the same cultural context, radically different community environments can produce opposite consequences of ties to natal kin.

In an era when half of marriages end in divorce, cohabitation has become more commonplace and those who do get married are doing so at an older age. So why do people marry when they do? And why do some couples choose to cohabit? A team of expert family sociologists examines these timely questions in Marriage and Cohabitation, the result of their research over the last decade on the issue of union formation.Situating their argument in the context of the Western world's 500-year history of marriage, the authors reveal what factors encourage marriage and cohabitat

Perspectives on international family change / Rukmalie Jayakody, Arland Thornton, William G. Axinn -- International dissemination of ideas about development and family change / Arland Thornton, Georgina Binstock, Dirgha Ghimire -- An uncertain future for African families / Thérèse Locoh, Myriam Mouvagha-Sow -- When history moves on : the foundations and diffusion of the second demographic transition / Ron Lesthaeghe, Johan Surkyn -- Ideational influences on family change in the United States / William G. Axinn, Amie Emens, Colter Mitchell -- Continuity and change : the family in Argentina / Georgina Binstock -- Family change in Iran : religion, revolution, and the state / Mohammad Jalal Abbasi-Shavazi, Peter McDonald -- Social change and marriage in Vietnam : from socialist state to market reform / Rukmalie Jayakody, Vu Tuan Huy -- The relevance of ideational changes to family transformation in postwar Japan / Makoto Atoh -- The influence of ideational dimensions of social change on family formation in Nepal / William G. Axinn, Dirgha J. Ghimire, Jennifer S. Barber -- Family change in Turkey : peasant society, Islam, and the revolution "from above" / Bernard Nauck, Daniela Klaus