Age Patterns of Marital Fertility: Revising the Coale-Trussell Method

Abstract

"This article revises the Coale-Trussell method for analyzing data from the World Fertility Survey by proposing and testing alternative log-linear and log-multiplicative models. The models, in one form or another, represent the structural constraint underlying the Coale-Trussell method on the variation in the age pattern of human fertility. With a Poisson distribution assumption for the number of births, several parameters of the models are simultaneously estimated via maximum likelihood. It is shown that the new approach can be adopted whenever fertility limitation is compared across multiple populations or subpopulations."

Religious affiliation, religiosity, and male and female fertility

“…These include demographic factors such as age, race and ethnicity, nativity, and marital status (Coale and Trussell 1974;Jaffe and Cullen 1975;Saenz and Morales 2005;Singley and Landale 1998;Xie and Pimentel 1992), and socioeconomic factors, for example, educational attainment, employment status, and income (Ballard 2004;Ellison, Echevarria, and Smith 2005;Lehrer 1996;Sander 1992). These variables are used as control variables in the equations predicting both male and female fertility.…”

Modelling the Dynamics of Demography in the Dutch Roman Limes Zone

“…Weiss (1973) provided fertility coefficients per 5-year age cohort, indicating the relative proportion in each cohort of the total number of children born. His figures, based on anthropological data, are lower than the values that were calculated from historical data by Henry (1961) and later modified by Coale & Trussell (1974; and by Xie (1990Xie ( , 1991Xie & Pimentel, 1992). These authors calculated the natural (marital) fertility rate as the mean number of offspring per year per married woman per 5-year age cohort.…”

United Nations Population Division

“…Relational models take a fixed age-pattern, often derived from a combination of data collected in similar populations and theory about the underlying social and biological processes, and adjust it to fit the observed data, usually by way of a parsimonious parameterization on a transformed scale. The method of Coale and Trussell (1974), updated by Xie (1990) and Xie and Pimentel (1992), is an example. However, the validity of these methods rests, in part, on an appropriate choice of model age pattern.…”