>From behan@osiris.Colorado.EDU Wed Sep 7 13:47:22 1994 Received: from osiris.Colorado.EDU (osiris.Colorado.EDU [128.138.151.16]) by csf.Colorado.EDU (8.6.9/8.6.9/CNS-3.5) with ESMTP id NAA03353 for ; Wed, 7 Sep 1994 13:47:22 -0600 Received: from taweret.colorado.edu (taweret.Colorado.EDU [128.138.151.21]) by osiris.Colorado.EDU (8.6.9/8.6.9/CNS-3.5) with ESMTP id NAA15005 for ; Wed, 7 Sep 1994 13:48:45 -0600 Received: (behan@localhost) by taweret.colorado.edu (8.6.9/8.6.9/CNS-3.5) id NAA11781; Wed, 7 Sep 1994 13:48:04 -0600 Date: Wed, 7 Sep 1994 13:48:03 -0600 (MDT) From: Behan Pamela To: PPN List Subject: Re: Fertility Modeling In-Reply-To: <9409060518.AA09837@cs4.lamar.edu> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII On Mon, 5 Sep 1994, HAL D. QUIGLEY wrote: > Would it be possible to identify a dimension of the concept "religion"? > As a "gross" example, how about number of children (or even spacing) and > attendance? Church attendence certainly can be measured, but it may not capture the significant aspect of religiosity to fertility practices. That may be more adequately captured by a subjective measure, such as "the importance of religion in your life", "the importance of obeying God's will," or "the importance of obeying the Church's teachings." (This could easily be tested, however, to see which measure correlates most strongly with fertility.) However, that still leaves us with the problem of different religions having different teachings/beliefs/values on sexuality, contraception, the importance of children, male and female roles, etc. I don't believe that the differences between, say, Islamic, Catholic, Protestant, Judaic, Hindu and Confucian teachings affecting fertility can be captured on a linear scale; even if they could, however, they aren't taught or received in the same way in different regions & cultures. For instance, the figures showing how many Catholics use birth control, in spite of the Pope's position on contraception, varies from country to country.. >Or, historically, when a given religion emerged on a space > and compare to population/fertility reports? An interesting thought. Do we have fertility data before and after such changes? We may, around the Protestant reformation, but there were other important changes going on at the same time (i.e., industrialization and urbanization). Any ideas? > My thought here is that it may help to consider "whose" education..for > example, parents of the "progeny-producers". This consideration may help > position the concept "education" as a reasonable variable preceeding > income.. This makes sense to me. Controlling for parent's education would allow us to look at whether the relation between income and fertility is consistent within classes (therefore disappearing when controlling for subject's education), or a genuine effect of education itself. Any thoughts on this? Is this variable generally available for most countries? > > Finally, and I apologize for such a lengthy post, I appreciate > Pamela's note regarding the concept of "overpopulation." It is the type > of critical thinking comment that I constantly want to evoke from my > students and collegues... Thanks! And thanks to Joe for making my brain work, as well.... Pamela Behan