Religion and Fertility in Contemporary Northern Ireland
نویسندگان
چکیده
Northern Ireland has been and continues to be deeply divided on the basis of religion. This paper examines and compares contemporary fertility in the two communities given the sharp declines that have occurred in recent decades. The data are drawn from the Northern Ireland Longitudinal Study and cover 108,000 women aged 16-44 in the period 1997-2007. A logit analysis of births in the period is undertaken based on individual demographic data and also the characteristics of the locality in which the woman is resident. The effect of religion is measured by its individual marginal effect averaged over the total sample, over time and by the age of the woman. The estimated average marginal effect is 4 % of the probability of a woman having a birth over the entire period. The effect peaks when the woman is between 29 and 30 years and is stable over time. When the fertility behaviour of each religious group is compared separately with those women that came from the same background but had lost their religion, it is found to differ substantially. Thus, community background is rejected as a possible explanation of the difference in fertility between declared Catholics and Protestants. Although the fertility rates of former Catholics and Protestants appear to be converging, the size of these groups is relatively small. There is no evidence to suggest that the small but distinct difference in the fertility rates of the two religious communities is likely to change in the immediate future.
منابع مشابه
WELCOME Religion and the patterns of conflict in Northern Ireland
Religious distinctions are key to social and symbolic bouundaries in many societies, and most certainly so in Northern Ireland. The historical patterning of religious opposition, most particularly perhaps in the conservative character of the forms of Protestantism and Catholicism in Ireland, is clear. Recent works have traced the many ways religion has fed into conflict in the present, and the ...
متن کاملThe inductive potential of religion categories in Northern Ireland
People often behave as if category members share an essence, and essentialising a category in this way promotes inductive inference. Although natural kind categories have been predominantly studied, some social categories are essentialised and here we consider the inductive potential of religion categories for children in Northern Ireland. We asked seven-, nineand eleven-year olds in Catholic-m...
متن کاملDoes equality legislation reduce intergroup differences? Religious affiliation, socio-economic status and mortality in Scotland and Northern Ireland: A cohort study of 400,000 people.
Religion frequently indicates membership of socio-ethnic groups with distinct health behaviours and mortality risk. Determining the extent to which interactions between groups contribute to variation in mortality is often challenging. We compared socio-economic status (SES) and mortality rates of Protestants and Catholics in Scotland and Northern Ireland, regions in which interactions between g...
متن کاملAnalysing the spatial scale of population concentrations by religion in Northern Ireland using global and local variograms
The spatial structure of population subgroups is important for many reasons. Information on the spatial concentrations of people in particular groups may be used for guiding government policy and is central to understanding issues such as differential access to resources. In addition, any geographical analysis of populations is partly a function of the spatial scale of variation of subgroups of...
متن کاملReligion, Literacy, and the Female-to-Male Ratio in India
This paper proposes a new explanation for religious differences in fertility in India by incorporating the issue of gender bias into the debate. It reports the results from an econometric investigation of the factors influencing the sex ratio at birth and among currently living children, by religion and by caste, for a sample of over 10,000 women in India. The investigation paid particular atte...
متن کامل