Cultural Inheritance and Male and Female Fertility

Li Zhang ()
Additional contact information
Li Zhang: Virginia Commonwealth University, L. Douglas Wilder School of Government and Public Affairs

Chapter Chapter 9 in Male Fertility Patterns and Determinants, 2011, pp 177-192 from Springer

Abstract: Abstract Taking a coevolutionary approach, this chapter examines how cultural inheritance affects male and female fertility. The coevolutionary approach argues that similar to genes, cultural traits inherited from parents rather than other non-parental sources lead to a greater resemblance in evolutionary outcome between parents and offspring. If the fertility transition is considered as part of the evolutionary process, then it is expected that the fertility outcome of offspring and parents are more similar if offspring inherit cultural traits directly from parents. Following this rationale, in the regime of declining fertility, offspring who inherit cultural traits from parents are expected to have a higher fertility. Using data from the National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG) Cycle 6, this chapter investigates the capability of the coevolutionary theory in explaining male and female fertility. The results show that if religion is considered as a cultural trait, then the cultural inheritance hypothesis proposed by coevolutionary theory is generally supported by empirical evidence. That is, individuals who reported the same religious affiliations as those of their parents tend to have a greater number of children than those who reported different religions than those of their parents. Such a positive effect of cultural inheritance on fertility does not vary by gender. These findings contribute to the existing fertility literature in several aspects, which will be discussed in the conclusion and discussion part of the chapter.

Keywords: Religious Affiliation; Female Respondent; Female Fertility; Fertility Transition; Cultural Trait (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:ssdmcp:978-90-481-8939-7_9

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/9789048189397

DOI: 10.1007/978-90-481-8939-7_9

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in The Springer Series on Demographic Methods and Population Analysis from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().