This research project proposes to increase the understanding of changing patterns of childlessness by accomplishing two specific aims.
The first aim of this project is to identify changing patterns in childlessness, divided across educational and racial groups for U.S. women born between 1950-54 and 1970-74, using marriage and fertility histories in the 2001 Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP), supported by data from marriage and fertility histories in June Current Population Surveys for 1990 and 1995. This part of the project will use event history models to estimate age-specific birth rates and derive estimates of proportions of women remaining childless at age 45, and to project levels of childlessness among women who have not yet completed their reproductive years. This projection exercise will improve upon previous analyses of group differences in childlessness in several technical respects: by modeling possible dependencies between a cohort's observed first birth rates at young adult years on its predicted first birth rates at older adult years, by providing estimates of the uncertainty due to both sampling error and model specification; by using data on marital status to assess model projections; and by evaluating possible effects of changes in educational attainment (across cohorts and within the life course) on estimated levels of childlessness within each educational group.
The second aim i s to use changes in marriage to identify racial and educational differences in the life course events that lead to rising levels of childlessness, using the 1996 and 2001 SIPP as the primary data source. This project will use a standard decomposition procedure outlined by Das Gupta (1993) to estimate the contribution of several demographic factors to recent increases in childlessness. These factors are: changes in marriage rates for childless women; changes in nonmarital first birth rates; and changes in first birth rates after marriage. The decomposition analysis of marriage and first birth transitions will show whether and how childlessness is increasing for different groups of women for very different reasons. As such, the analysis of the marital paths leading to childlessness will provide information about important differences between childless women of different socioeconomic status. This analysis will also provide insights into possible links between rising childlessness and other family changes (such as increases in non-marital fertility) that have occurred mostly among socially and economically disadvantaged groups of women. ? ? ?
