Do siblings’ fertility decisions influence each other?
Open Access
- 1 November 2010
- journal article
- Published by Duke University Press in Demography
- Vol. 47 (4), 923-934
- https://doi.org/10.1007/bf03213733
Abstract
Individuals’ fertility decisions are shaped not only by their own characteristics and life course paths but also by social interaction with others. However, in practice, it is difficult to disentangle the role of social interaction from other factors, such as individual and family background variables. We measure social interaction through the cross-sibling influences on fertility. Continuous-time hazard models are estimated separately for women’s first and second births. In addition to individual socioeconomic variables, demographic variables, and an unobserved factor specific to each sibling pair, siblings’ birth events and their timing enter as time-varying covariates. We use data from longitudinal population-wide Norwegian administrative registers. The data cover more than 110,000 sibling pairs and include the siblings’ fertility, education, income, and marital histories. Our results indicate that cross-sibling influences are relatively strong for the respondents’ first births but weak for the second parity transition.Keywords
This publication has 21 references indexed in Scilit:
- Effects of family structure on the risk of first premarital birth in the presence of correlated unmeasured family effectsSocial Science Research, 2005
- The Emergence of Lowest‐Low Fertility in Europe During the 1990sPopulation and Development Review, 2002
- The High Fertility of College Educated Women in NorwayDemographic Research, 2001
- The younger siblings of teenage mothers: A follow-up of their pregnancy risk.Developmental Psychology, 2001
- Impact of Adolescent Childbearing on Families and Younger Sibling: Effects that Increase Younger Siblings' Risk for Early PregnancyApplied Developmental Science, 1998
- Social Interactions and Contemporary Fertility TransitionsPopulation and Development Review, 1996
- Social Learning, Social Influence, and New Models of FertilityPopulation and Development Review, 1996
- Social contagion and adolescent sexual behavior: A developmental EMOSA model.Psychological Review, 1993
- Structural Constraints on the Life CourseHuman Development, 1986
- A Theory of Social Comparison ProcessesHuman Relations, 1954