Heterogeneity in 'High Fertility' Societies:Insights from Compositional Demography

Demographic transition theory has been conducive to a rather dichotomous view of global fertility: traditional versus modern, high versus low fertility. The knowledge that high fertility could be achieved by subpopulations with different characteristics and reproductive behaviors somehow vanished from (historical) demographers' attention. This study unpacks heterogeneity in a 'high fertility' society, i.e. 19th-century Zeeland, the Netherlands. Sequence and cluster analysis were employed to distinguish groups with disparate reproductive trajectories with data from Genlias/LINKS including 15,01... Mehr ...