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Ethnic Dimensions of Guatemala’s Stalled Transition: A Parity-Specific Analysis of Ladino and Indigenous Fertility Regimes

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Demography

Abstract

In some contemporary populations, fertility levels appear to plateau, with women maintaining a consistently high level of fertility for a relatively extended period. Because this plateau does not reflect the historical patterns observed in Europe, the focus of most studies on fertility patterns, mechanisms underlying the plateau and the reinstatement of a decline have not been fully explored and are not fully understood. Through the construction of fertility histories of 25,000 women using multiple years of health survey data, we analyze some of the components of stalled fertility as they pertain to Guatemala, the only Central American country to have experienced a stalled fertility decline.

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Notes

  1. De Broe and Hinde (2006) and Santiso-Gálvez and Bertrand (2004) are the only exceptions we found that consider whether the transition is “delayed” or stalled.

  2. Spanish-speaking individuals of mixed ancestry.

  3. In our application, the earliest period estimated is January 1970, and we define calendar month codes to start counting from 0 at that date. The maximum period in our analysis is December 2005, or 431 in terms of calendar month code.

  4. Means and medians of the distribution are almost identical.

  5. The use of an offset in this way is referred to as a log rate model. We are thus using a local polynomial log rate model.

  6. The duration is 0 at age 10 and 180 at age 25.

  7. All computation is carried out in R version 3.0 (R Core Team 2013). Hazard surfaces are estimated using the package locfit (Loader 2013). All other components of methodology are encoded in R functions written by the authors.

  8. Figures showing the estimated parity-specific hazard surfaces for all women and ladino women are provided in Online Resource 1.

  9. We use educational attainment as a time-fixed variable. Processing education in this way, as opposed to time-varying, may impact interpretation of the transition rates to first birth. However, because transition to first birth is relatively static here, we argue that using a time-fixed variable has little impact on our results. We also use the type of place of residence provided by DHS at the time of the survey. DHS data do not provide information on place of residence that varies over time. Given that individuals may have been displaced because of violence, we note that this is a weakness of our analysis.

  10. Another way to get at this test is to fit parity-specific hazard models to test for significant three way interactions for ethnicity × education × urban along with period effects. The significance reported earlier persists in these hazard model tests, but we do not include the results here to keep this article of a reasonable length. A methodology note reporting those model results and their interpretation is available upon request from the authors.

  11. A comparable table containing the decomposition by education group is provided in Online Resource 1. The online supplement also contains three figures showing the underlying changes by 6-month interval from 1970 to 2005 for all women, ladino women, and indigenous women.

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Acknowledgments

Both authors contributed equally to the production of this article. Many thanks to the Editor as well as the comments and suggestions of two very helpful reviewers.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Geography, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT, 84112-9155, USA

    Kathryn Grace

  2. Department of Geography and Institute for Social, Behavioral, and Economic Research, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106-2150, USA

    Stuart Sweeney

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  1. Kathryn Grace
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  2. Stuart Sweeney
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Correspondence to Stuart Sweeney.

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Grace, K., Sweeney, S. Ethnic Dimensions of Guatemala’s Stalled Transition: A Parity-Specific Analysis of Ladino and Indigenous Fertility Regimes. Demography 53, 117–137 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13524-015-0452-8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13524-015-0452-8

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