The proposed project is a continuation and expansion of our earlier project, """"""""Contraceptive Choice in a Changing Environment."""""""" Its overall goal is an improved understanding of demographic responses to dramatic social change. Nang Rong district, Thailand is an ideal natural laboratory to examine the demographic responses triggered by the social changes underway in many societies. Building on data assembled for 1984 and 1988 (that are the focus of analysis in the earlier project), we propose an additional round of data collection in 1994 in the villages surveyed in 1984 and 1988 and a follow-up of migrants to Buriram (a county seat), Nakornratchisima (a regional city), and Bangkok (the national capital). The resulting data set will include three waves of observation (1984, 1988, 1994), multiple levels of observation (individuals, co-resident families, households, communities), tracking of migrants to three principal destinations, and retrospective event history data for migrants and non-migrants. Building upon our earlier work, social network data will incorporated at the community, household and individual level. Using these data, we propose to analyze two possible responses to social and economic change: contraceptive choice and out-migration and delayed parenthood. The proposed analyses will be multilevel in thrust, focus on change at the individual, household, and community levels, and take account of unobserved heterogeneity at each of these levels and the nature of networks within which social behavior occurs. In addition to these multivariate analyses, we will begin with methodological and descriptive analyses, particularly (a) the order, diversity and crispness of life course transitions and (b) the inter-village, inter-household, and interpersonal networks in Nang Rong district.
