Neighborhoods and Fertility in Accra, Ghana: An AMOEBA-Based Approach

Abstract

Fertility levels remain high in most of sub-Saharan Africa, despite recent declines, and even in a large capital city such as Accra, Ghana, women are having children at a pace that is well above replacement level and this will contribute to significant levels of future population growth in the city. Our purpose in this article is to evaluate the way in which neighborhood context might shape reproductive behavior in Accra. In the process, we introduce several important innovations to the understanding of intraurban fertility levels in a sub-Saharan African city: (1) Despite the near explosion of work on neighborhoods as a spatial unit of analysis, very little of this research has been conducted outside of the richer countries; (2) we characterize neighborhoods on the basis of local knowledge of what we call vernacular neighborhoods; (3) we then define what we call organic neighborhoods using a new clustering tool—the AMOEBA algorithm—to create these neighborhoods; and (4) we then we evaluate and explain which of the neighborhood concepts has the largest measurable contextual effect on an individual woman's reproductive behavior. Multilevel regression analysis suggests that vernacular neighborhoods are more influential on a woman's decision to delay marriage, whereas the organic neighborhoods based on socioeconomic status better capture the factors that shape fertility decisions after marriage.

A pesar de una reciente declinación, los niveles de fertilidad siguen siendo altos en la mayor parte del África subsahariana, e incluso en una ciudad capital tan grande como Accra, Ghana, las mujeres están teniendo hijos a un ritmo que está bien por encima del nivel de remplazo, lo cual contribuirá significativamente en el futuro crecimiento de la población de la ciudad. Nuestro propósito en este artículo es evaluar la manera como el contexto del vecindario podría configurar el comportamiento reproductivo de Accra. En el proceso, introdujimos varias innovaciones importantes para entender los niveles de fertilidad intraurbanos en una ciudad africana subsahariana: (1) A pesar de lo casi explosivo del número de trabajos que toman al vecindario como unidad de análisis espacial, muy poco es lo que se ha hecho en este tipo de investigación por fuera de los países más ricos; (2) caracterizamos los vecindarios con base en el conocimiento local de lo que llamamos vecindarios vernáculos; (3) luego definimos lo que llamamos vecindarios orgánicos utilizando una nueva herramienta de agrupamiento—el algoritmo AMOEBA—para crear estos vecindarios; y (4) después evaluamos y explicamos cuál de los conceptos de vecindario tiene el más grande efecto contextual medible sobre el comportamiento reproductivo individual de una mujer. El análisis de regresión multinivel sugiere que los vecindarios vernáculos son más influyentes en lo concerniente a la decisión de una mujer de aplazar el matrimonio, en tanto que los vecindarios orgánicos basados en estatus socioeconómico capturan mejor los factores que configuran las decisiones de fertilidad después del matrimonio.

Keywords:

• Accra
• AMOEBA
• fertility
• multilevel analysis
• neighborhoods

关键词:

• 阿克拉
• 阿米巴算法
• 生育率
• 多层次的分析
• 邻里

Palabras clave:

• Accra, AMOEBA
• fertilidad
• análisis de multinivel
• vecindarios

Acknowledgments

This research was supported by Grant R01 HD054906 from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. Earlier versions of this article were presented at the annual meeting of the Population Association of America, New York, March 2007; the annual meeting of the Association of American Geographers, San Francisco, April 2007; the Social Science in Place Seminar Series, Survey Research Center, University of California, Berkeley, November 2007; the Initiative in Population Research Seminar Series at The Ohio State University, February 2008; a colloquium at the Office of Population Research, Princeton University, April 2008; and the IUSSP International Seminar on Human Fertility in Africa: Trends in the Last Decade and Prospects for Change, Cape Coast, Ghana, 2008. We thank Jared Aldstadt for providing us with the ArcGIS toolboxes for AMOEBA, Lawrence Brown for insightful comments on an earlier version of this article, S. V. Subramanian for advice regarding the multilevel modeling; and Mei-Po Kwan and the anonymous reviewers for numerous valuable suggestions for revision. Justin Stoler and Dean Daniels provided important assistance with the classification of the remotely sensed imagery.