A Study Of Marriage And Childbearing Interval Among Women

Fertility has three dimensions: quantity,gender,and time.For a long time,the academic community has focused more on the number and gender of births,while paying less attention to the timing of births.With the development of the times,procreation has increasingly become a rational decision.Women and their families not only pay attention to the number and gender of children,but also begin to choose when to give birth independently.The early or late timing of fertility affects the fertility rate during the period,which in turn affects changes in the overall population structure.Especially in the low fertility environment of modern society,reproductive time has emerged as equally important as the number and gender of births.Based on the above background,this study selected marriage and childbearing interval,an important fertility time variable,to describe the changes in women’s marriage and childbearing interval in China,and analyzed the social factors that affect its changes,in an effort to add data support to the formulation of population policies.This paper first combs the literature on marriage and childbearing interval at home and abroad.On the basis of summarizing previous studies,it uses China Family Panel Studies(CFPS)data to study the heterogeneity of women’s marriage and childbearing interval.The full text can be divided into two parts:(1)descriptive research,which uses Kaplan-Meier nonparametric estimation method to describe the level of women’s marriage and childbearing interval from three dimensions of living area,registered residence,and birth cohort,The statistical significance was tested through the Log Rank Test.(2)Research on influencing factors,using the Proportional hazard model,divides the factors that affect the spacing between marriage and childbirth into two aspects:fertility costs and social culture.The fertility costs mainly include the direct economic costs that families pay when raising children,and the time costs that mothers pay when caring for children;In terms of social culture,the second demographic transition theory was introduced to analyze the impact of the change in values brought about by the second demographic transition on marriage and childbearing events,mainly including women’s different evaluations of the importance of children and marital relationships in the family,their pursuit of professional status,and whether they had cohabitation experiences before marriage.In addition,considering the traditional emphasis on marriage and childbearing in Chinese culture,this study also included traditional conceptual factors such as whether to live with parents and their educational level in the model to explore their impact on women’s marriage and childbearing spacing.The research conclusion shows that there is heterogeneity in the interval between marriage and childbearing among women,and there are significant differences in the length of the interval between marriage and childbearing among women in different living areas and childbearing cohorts;At the same time,this study also found that factors such as the cost of raising children,the focus of family attention,professional status,premarital cohabitation,living with parents,and the educational level of parents have a significant impact on women’s marital and childbearing spacing;In addition,the living area,registered residence,birth cohort,and marriage age as control variables were put into the model,which also showed good statistical significance.