Where have all the children gone? Women's reports of more childlessness at older ages than when they were younger in a large-scale continuous household survey in Britain

Datos Bibliográficos

ID4268575
AutoresMichael Murphy (0000-0001-8458-3992)
Año2009
Volumen63
Número2
Páginas115-133
Fecha de publicación2009-07-01
Open AccessNo
TipoARTICLE
RevistaPopulation Studies (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0032-4728 • E-ISSN: 1477-4747
EditorialInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/00324720902917238
PMID19536695
OpenAlexW1989566075
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas21
Referencias citadas34

Levels of childlessness reported by the same cohorts of women and surveyed by the British General Household Survey increase with age by over 50 per cent between their early 40s and their late 50s for women born in the early 1940s. Yet the reported mean fertility of parous women remains constant with increasing age. Similar results hold within sub-groups such as different educational and marital status groups. Possible reasons for these findings include declining comparability of the base population over time due to differential migration, mortality, or institutionalization, changes in survey design and content, and differential non-response by childless and parous women. The evidence shows that these are not adequate explanations. The most likely reason is deliberate under-reporting of childbearing among older cohorts of women. The findings have implications for the interpretation of retrospective data in surveys and for the availability of informal care for older people

Childlessness · Comparability · Fertility · Geography · Institutionalisation · Marital status · Population · Psychiatry · Scale (ratio) · Sociology · demographic modeling and climate adaptation · Demography · Health disparities and outcomes · Intergenerational Family Dynamics and Caregiving · Medicine · Psychology · Gerontology

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