The Own-Children Method of Fertility Estimation.

Abstract

It is now more than 2 decades since the own-children method of fertility estimation was 1st developed and applied to census data to obtain estimates of differential fertility for the US. The own-children method has become a standard tool in the demographers repertoire of indirect fertility estimation technics; the method has been applied most extensively in Asia Latin America and the US. The own-children method of fertility estimation is a reverse-survival technic for estimating age-specific birth rates for years previous to a census or household survey. This book 1) provides a concise summary of the own-children methodology and problems of application and 2) spells out step-by-step procedures for applying the methodology. Recent extensions of the own-children method include estimation of age-parity-specific birth rates age-specific birth rates for currently married women birth rates by age and duration since 1st marriage for ever-married women and age-specific birth rates for men. The ability to reconstruct statistically valid birth history data from census and large-scale household surveys promises to open vast new areas for fertility research. The own-children method has several strengths: 1) the method is useful in less developed countries where vital registration often is seriously deficient; 2) own-children estimates of fertility can be tabulated by whatever characteristics are recorded in the census or household survey; 3) the method ordinarily requires no new data collection and is therefore inexpensive to apply; 4) the large size of the census or household survey samples to which the own-children method is typically applied relative to the small sample size of the tyical fertility survey; and 5) the own-children estimates of age-specific birth rates derived for each year during the 15 year estimation period immediately preceding the census or survey do not suffer from age truncation.