SOUTHEAST ASIA FERTILITY PROJECT

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Fertility

Description from Hirschman et al 1992:

The dependent variable is an index of current fertility- -the number of surviving children, aged 0-2, of each woman in the sample. Based upon the own-children methodology (Cho, Retherford, and Choe 1986), each child is matched with his or her mother in the household. In order to provide a more intuitive index of fertility, the dependent variable is weighted to represent the number of children a woman would eventually have if her current fertility continued for a span of years in her reproductive career (akin to a total fertility rate). To obtain an annual rate, the total number of surviving children is divided by 3 (because children age 0-2 were included) and then multiplied by 15 (the number of years in each of the two age categories of women: 15-29 and 30-44) in order to estimate a synthetic cohort rate. (In the early stages of the project, an annual fertility rate was established by taking the total number of surviving children and dividing this by four, because children aged 1-4 were included. This age range was used because of the high percentage of undernumerated children, age 0 in the 1971 Indonesian Census, see Cho, 1980, p.31) The index of current fertility is also adjusted upward for the proportion of unmatched children in the sample, assuming that unmatched children were randomly distributed. Plus we adjusted fertility to account for infant mortality at the province level and a woman's own experience with child death. The project currently uses an adjusted fertility measure based on children age 0-2, adjusted for the percentage unmatched and infant mortality in the province/district.