Browsing by Author "Morgan, S Philip"

In this dissertation, I examine at the aggregate and individual levels, why contemporary fertility preferences diverge from actual fertility. I use three waves of cross-sectional survey data from the National Family Health Surveys from India (also known as the Indian Demographic and Health Surveys), fielded in 1992-3, 1998-9 and 2005-6 to investigate the disjuncture between preferences and behavior. The first empirical chapter outlines and operationalizes a new framework to decompose the incongruence between stated preferences and actual fertility into a set of parameters, such as unwanted births, gender preference and postponement of births to later ages, each of which varies in its level and intensity between societies and over time. By delineating the societal constraints that women do not incorporate in their childbearing intentions, this model provides a useful framework to explain variability in fertility in contemporary intermediate- and low-fertility populations. Equally important, the framework provides avenues to enquire into the fundamental structural and cultural correlates producing differences between family size preferences and actual fertility.

Subsequent empirical chapters explore various aspects of fertility preferences in detail. The second chapter probes a key socioeconomic correlate of individual-level fertility preferences, namely educational differences in preferences. In brief, I find that educational differences in family size preferences have considerably converged over time using two-way fixed effects models. However, there is still considerable heterogeneity in the implementation of preferences (as manifested by the use of contraception). Accordingly, in the third chapter, I analyze the multilevel sources of variation in the use of contraception by young women, given that they express a preference to space or stop childbearing. Using multilevel models, I find that community norms play a strong role in the use of contraception by young women to meet their fertility preferences to space or stop childbearing. I argue that community norms are an influential determinant of young women's ability to regulate their own fertility - serving to enhance or constrain their use of contraception to either space or stop childbearing.

Overall, findings from this dissertation highlight the macro-level factors that explain variation in contemporary fertility, of which fertility preferences emerge as a critical parameter. This dissertation also illuminates the growing convergence of fertility preferences across socioeconomic categories, while focusing attention on local community forces that influence fertility behavior even in the face of women's stated preferences.

This dissertation aims to examine empirically how the transition to adulthood--the complex process to attain adult independence by completing education, starting the first job, getting married and entering the parenthood--has changed during the Chinese economic reform. The first chapter provides an overall picture of changes in the transition to adulthood in China, and the second and third chapters focus on family and non-family transitions, respectively. The first chapter examines if the transition to adulthood was postponed and de-standardized between 1982 and 2005. Data come from 1982, 1990, 2000 1% census sample and 2005 intercensal survey. The results show a significant postponement of education and employment, but little change in family formation. The transition to adulthood is also de-standardized, especially over the late 20s. The changes are more pronounced among urban residents than rural residents and migrants, and among female migrants than male migrants. The second and third chapters focus on urban China. The second chapter examines how family change is influenced by macro-level institutional contexts. It uses provincial variations in the levels of economic development and interactions with the global markets to differentiate two broad theoretical perspectives on family change: development and diffusion. Data come from respondents born between 1960 and 1979 from the 2008 Chinese General Social Survey and provincial-level economic indicators in 1990 and 2000. Results from latent class analysis and multi-level logistic regressions provide more support for the diffusion perspective. The postponement of family formation varies substantially across provinces. This provincial variation is positively associated with the levels of interactions with world markets (as measured by Foreign Direct Investment performance), but not with socioeconomic development or unemployment rate. The third chapter examines the trend of network-based job search in reform-era China. Data come from a pooled sample of first-time job-seekers from 1998 Labor Market and Social Mobility Survey, 2005 Social Capital Survey of China, and 2008 Chinese General Social Survey. The results suggest a stable increase of network use in finding the first job. The use of strong ties also increases initially, and persists afterwards. These findings are, by and large, consistent with other recent studies of the transition to adulthood reported for other countries. However, the culture of origin and local institutions also make the transition to adulthood of Chinese young adults unique in various respects.

Current theories of marriage and family formation behavior tend to rely on the assumption that people can and do consciously plan both fertility and marriage and post-hoc intentions should align with a priori reasons for action (Fishbein & Azjen 2010). However, research shows this is not always the case and researchers have labeled inconsistencies between pre- and post- reports of intentions and behavior as retrospective bias. Researchers such as Bongaarts (1990) have tried to create models that minimize this "bias".

The Theory of Conjunctural Action is a new model that can explain, rather than explain away, this "bias" (Johnson-Hanks et al. 2011; Morgan and Bachrach 2011). This new theoretical innovation uses insights about the workings of the mind to gain a greater understanding of how individuals report family formation decisions and how and why they might change over time. In this theory, individuals experience conjunctures (or social context which exists in the material world) and use cognitive schemas (or frames within the mind through which individuals use to interpret the world around them). These schemas are multiple and the set can change over time as individuals incorporate new experiences into them.

In this dissertation, I explore how and why pre- and post- reports of intentions may be different using insights from the Theory of Conjunctural Action. In the second chapter, using data from the NLSY79 and log-linear models, I show that there are considerable inconsistencies between prospective and retrospective reports of fertility intentions. Specifically, nearly 6% of births (346 out of 6022) are retrospectively reported as unwanted at the time of conception by women who prospectively reported they wanted more children one or two years prior to the birth. Similarly, over 400 births are retrospectively reported as wanted by women who intended to have no more births one or two years prior (i.e., in the prior survey wave). The innovation here is to see this inconsistency, not as an error in reporting, but as different construals of a seemingly similar question. In other words, women may not be consciously intending births and then enacting these intentions; rather women may have different schemas (or meanings) of prospective and retrospective measures of fertility intentions.

The next chapter uses this same data to test if women use different schemas to guide their reporting of prospective and retrospective fertility intentions. Again, using insights from the Theory of Conjunctural Action, I expect that different schemas (represented by different sets of variables) predict prospective and retrospective wantedness differentially. I show that retrospective reports of wantedness are guided more by age, marital status, education, job satisfaction, and educational enrollment at birth, while prospective wantedness was guided more by number of children desired and how many children they currently have. I show four logistic models predicting wanted verses unwanted births. I then compared the model fit of logistic models predicting prospective wanted verses unwanted births using the hypothesized prospective and retrospective schema variables and I did the same for the models of retrospective wantedness. I find that when women report retrospective wantedness, they are guided more by the hypothesized variables.

Finally, in the last empirical paper, because schemas are difficult to measure, I build a methodology, Network Text Analysis, to measure schemas and to understand the schemas surrounding marriage and fertility for low-income Blacks who have not yet had children. I use interview data from the Becoming Parents and Partners Study (BPP), a sample of young, unmarried, childless adults with low incomes. I use these data to explore schemas of childbearing and marriage. Contrary to previous findings that low-income parents do not link marriage and fertility and have different requirements for marriage and fertility, I find that marriage and childbearing are indeed linked and have similar requirements for low-income Blacks prior to childbearing. Low income Blacks hold quite traditional views about the role of marriage and its sequencing vis-à-vis fertility. I argue that the material constraints to marital childbearing may lead to non-marital births and thus respondents sever schemas connecting marriage and childbearing and adopt other schemas of childbearing to provide ad hoc justifications for their behavior.