Demographic socialization and reproductive behavior in a transitional context: a macro–micro perspective

Abstract

This paper analyzes the impact of individuals’ socialization in a given demographic context on their later reproductive behavior in 19th century Geneva. To assess this socialization effect on the fertility of first generation immigrants, I combine family reconstitution data with Coale’s aggregate indexes of marital fertility. I then run two-level Poisson regression models predicting age-specific fertility rates as a function of individual characteristics at the lower level and as a function of province-level fertility at the higher level. The results show a strong socialization effect among couples who were already married when arriving in Geneva, whereas among immigrants who arrived as singles and who got married in Geneva the impact of demographic socialization turns out much weaker.

Keywords:

• fertility transition
• migration
• socialization effect

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the participants of the Workshop ‘The intergenerational transmission of reproductive behavior: comparative perspectives’ held in Leuven, Belgium in 2011, and an anonymous reviewer for their inspiring comments on a previous draft of this article.

Notes

1. For a glossary for multilevel analysis see Diez Roux (2002). Further information on multilevel count models can be found, for example, in Snijders & Bosker (1999), in Rabe-Hesketh & Skrondal (2008), and in Rasbash et al. (2009).

2. Among couples who immigrated as husband and wife (panel on the upper left) marital fertility was slightly lower than among first-generation immigrants who got married in Geneva. This can be explained by the fact that among the former the reproductive life course observed in Geneva was systematically left-censored, which means that at least part of these couples already had children before immigration.