Abstract
This paper investigates the associations between preferred family size of women in rural Bihar, India and the fertility behaviours of their mother and mother-in-law. Scheduled interviews of 440 pairs of married women aged 16–34 years and their mothers-in-law were conducted in 2011. Preferred family size is first measured by Coombs scale, allowing us to capture latent desired number of children and then categorized into three categories (low, medium and high). Women’s preferred family size is estimated using ordered logistic regression. We find that the family size preferences are not associated with mother’s fertility but with mother’s education. Mother-in-law’s desired number of grandchildren is positively associated with women’s preferred family size. However, when the woman has higher education than her mother-in-law, her preferred family size gets smaller, suggesting that education provides women with greater autonomy in their decision-making on childbearing.
Highlights
It is well documented that parents play an important role in shaping the preferences and behaviours of young adults
This paper investigates the associations between preferred family size of women in rural Bihar, India and the fertility behaviours of their mother and motherin-law
Since women interviewed in our survey are still in reproductive age, we focused on their fertility preferences controlling for the number of children ever born
Summary
It is well documented that parents play an important role in shaping the preferences and behaviours of young adults. A wide array of studies, mainly in Western developed countries, has shown such intergenerational transmission with respect to fertility preferences (Axinn et al 1994; Buhler and Philipov 2005) and number of children ever born (Murphy and Knudsen 2002; Murphy and Wang 2001). Research on lessdeveloped countries has shown that living in an extended family is associated with higher fertility (Easterlin 1978), but so far very little is known about the intergenerational transmission of fertility preferences in such contexts. Studies on intergenerational transmission of fertility in non-Western countries are rare (Murphy 2013). Shows a positive though small intergenerational correlation between women’s completed fertility and that of their parents across 46 sub-Saharan Africa, Asian and Latin American countries (Murphy 2012)
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