The impact of nuptiality on fertility trends in peninsular Malaysia, 1957-1980
Date
1983
Authors
Tan, Poo Chang
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Abstract
The main aim of the thesis is to carry out a systematic study of
the relationship between nuptiality and fertility, comparing and
contrasting the Malay and Chinese patterns in Peninsular Malaysia.
The Indians, being a small and mixed group, are excluded. The study
concentrates on the period 1957 to 1980.
The framework of analysis is to examine the nuptiality behaviour
of cohorts of women, controlling for their background and
socioeconomic characteristics. With the cohort frame in mind, the
study first concentrates on analysing the Malay and Chinese nuptiality
patterns, using various multivariate techniques. It then moves on to
relate the changes in nuptiality patterns to changes in fertility
patterns or birth timing. In the final section, an attempt is made to
clarify or explain the macro time trends in fertility and nuptiality
in Peninsular Malaysia in terms of the observed patterns for cohorts.
The findings are that the 1957-80 period was a period of great
social, economic and demographic change. There was improvement in
income levels, lower adult and infant mortality, higher levels of
education and literacy, higher levels of urbanisation, and greater
participation in work outside agriculture, such as in manufacturing
and services. There was also evidence of decline in period fertility,
which can be attributed to both increasing age at first marriage and
lower marital fertility. The decline in period fertility was faster for the Chinese than
the Malays. The shift to childbearing at older ages, which is
currently taking place, has caused period fertility to fall below the
underlying cohort fertility. The older age at first marriage and
hence older age at childbearing of the Chinese compared with the
Malays is giving a misleading impression of the extent to which the
Chinese are reducing their completed family size. As yet, it is
difficult to predict by how much family size is being reduced in
Malaysia. The indications are that the postponement of births to
later ages may now have reached a point where it is balanced by the
making-up of births at older ages. Under these circumstances, if
cohort fertility does not continue to decline, period fertility may
stabilise and even rise above cohort fertility if younger cohorts
continue to space their births closer together. For the Malays, there
are signs that the period fertility had already begun to rise in the
late 1970s. The Chinese period fertility may only start rising in the
1980s because they have delayed their marriages and births longer than
the Malays.
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Thesis (PhD)
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