Critical Perspectives on Schooling and Fertility in the Developing World (1999) / Chapter Skim
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10 Fertility and Education: What Do We Now Know?
10 Fertility and Education: What Do We Now Know?
Pages 287-306
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From page 287... ...
In both cases, the objective is apparently to summarize the existing evidence on education-fertility relationships. Both works also reflect a critical stance and imply an invitation to transcend superficial interpretations and seek deeper understanding.
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From page 288... ...
Finally, new policy demands have encouraged the study of additional linkages, including reverse, indirect, and intergenerational influences between education and fertility. In short, it has become more difficult to assess what education-fertility associations mean because the body of evidence has grown at once too complex in comparison with existing theories and too crude in light of current methodological standards and heightened policy demands.
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From page 290... ...
That is, high fertility is no longer the unique policy issue sustaining education-fertility research. Instead, this research is increasingly motivated by policy concerns related to women's educational attainment, the welfare of children, labor force quality, economic inequality, and social stratification.
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From page 291... ...
indicates that literacy but not numeracy contributes to reduce fertility. Conversely, one may recognize that individuals do make deliberate choices about their schooling, sometimes overcoming major obstacles.2 However, such schooling choices need not involve a conscious anticipation of fertility implications, nor do the distinctive characteristics of the educationally driven necessarily shape fertility outcomes.
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From page 293... ...
Table 10-2 thus illustrates the possible ambiguity in the meaning of education-fertility associations. Depending on assumptions and evidence on the timing of fertility and schooling, randomness in the distribution of schooling outcomes, and the relatedness of schooling and fertility choices, one can infer causation, unobserved heterogeneity, reverse causation, or endogeneity.
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From page 294... ...
As shown in Table 10-1, the policy focus has shifted progressively from an exclusive concern for whether one's education affects one's fertility to a larger set of questions, including whether one's fertility affects one's educational attainment, whether parents' fertility affects their children's schooling outcomes, and whether the schooling experience of children affects their fertility. As noted earlier, this evolution in research themes reflects a growing concern of population policy with issues of women's status and educational attainment, child welfare, labor force quality, economic inequality, and social stratification.
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From page 295... ...
Nonetheless, the following societal changes in developing countries and sociological changes within the field of demography are likely to have played important roles. One key societal change concerns women's rising levels of educational attainment.
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In summary, three main factors contributed to an expansion of the policy agenda sustaining education-fertility research, in a direction that gives greater emphasis to the effects of fertility on schooling both within and across generations. These three factors are the rising levels of female enrollment, changing ideological climates in developing countries, and the blurring of the distinction between formal demography and population studies.
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From page 297... ...
A1though these empirical generalizations represent a major advance, the ultimate step is to develop contextual theories that can generate quantitative hypotheses on the effects of specific contextual variables on the quantity-quality tradeoff and optimal fertility and parental investment choices (Eloundou-Enyegue and Stokes, 1997~. In sum, regardless of the particular linkage investigated, theoretical arguments exist for expecting a negative relationship between education and fertility.
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From page 298... ...
Technical Changes During the last three decades, the technical aspects of demographic research have markedly improved. Major advances concern both research tools and techniques, that is, both the hardware and software of demographic research.
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From page 299... ...
For instance, the lack of schooling histories in most major data sets still limits the application of event-history techniques in studies of educational attainment. Likewise, little research on the effects of education on fertility in developing countries has adequately addressed endogeneity issues.
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From page 300... ...
MOUNTING EVIDENCE Because of the methodological improvements noted earlier, raw empirical evidence has accumulated, mostly in the form of correlations, regression coefficients, and odds ratios depicting micro-level associations between education and fertility. Beyond the sheer number of case studies, geographical coverage has improved markedly thanks to the implementation of WFS and DHS surveys throughout the developing world.7 However, although empirical evidence is necessary to advance scientific knowledge, neither clarity nor consensus necessarily results from the mere accumulation of findings.
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From page 301... ...
Interpretation difficulties concern individual studies and the basis on which researchers determine whether an association between education and fertility reflects a causal influence, heterogeneity, reverse causation, or the endogeneity of schooling and fertility choices. Generalization difficulties concern how to reconcile findings from different studies.
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From page 302... ...
Over the same period, substantial methodological improvements have occurred, whether they concern the technical tools of research the greater use of computers in demographic research, the development of statistical techniques to address problems of statistical control, unobserved heterogeneity, endogeneity, and the study of dynamic processes or the social organization of demographic research, with a growing concentration of data and research production within a few institutions and an increasing separation of data collection and analysis activities. Finally, the implementation of large-scale surveys across the developing world has generated a voluminous database that permits extensive analyses and crosscountry comparisons.
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From page 303... ...
This research could build on the methodological experience of similar research in developed countries. Likewise, research must reexamine the effects of high fertility on schooling at the family level within a dynamic framework that acknowledges time variations in sibship size and family context, as well as unobserved heterogeneity in family background.
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From page 304... ...
1993 The effects of children's schooling on fertility limitation. Population Studies 47(3)
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From page 305... ...
Hobcraft, eds., Reproductive Change in Developing Countries: Insights from the World Fertility Survey. London: Oxford University Press.
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