PMID: 11607687Jun 25, 1996Paper

Correlates of the desired family size among Indian communities

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
N V JoshiS Patil

Abstract

The People of India database of the Anthropological Survey of India documents 631 cultural, ecological, and economic traits of the 4635 communities to which the entire Indian population is assigned. Focusing on 1342 communities of South India, we looked for correlates of low (1 or 2 children) and high (4 or more children) desired family size (DFS) reported as the norm for any given community by key informants. We found 10 cultural and 18 economic traits to be significantly correlated to high DFS and 21 cultural and 9 economic traits to low DFS. The economic traits so identified are compatible with high family size being desired by parents who have little capability of investing in quality of offspring, but whose children contribute economically from an early age. In contrast, communities desiring low family size are part of the modern intensive agriculture/organized industry/services sector and invest heavily in educating their children. A composite index based on 27 economic traits (CEI) has a high predictive value with respect to the DFS for the entire set of 4635 Indian communities. The 31 cultural traits highly correlated to high or low DFS constitute 5 clusters that can be identified as characterizing scheduled tribes, sch...Continue Reading

References

Sep 1, 1983·Annals of Human Biology·M Gadgil, K C Malhotra
May 1, 1995·Demography·A E RafteryA Aghajanian

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Citations

Nov 26, 2008·Social Science & Medicine·Srinivasan Chokkanathan
Jul 28, 2013·Trauma, Violence & Abuse·Meghna Bhat, Sarah E Ullman
Dec 21, 2005·American Journal of Physical Anthropology·Edward H HagenMichael E Price

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