Thursday 11 September 2003, 9am, Quiet Room
Cloudy concepts: estimating the number of teenage mothers in England
Mary Shaw, Roy Maxwell and Debbie Lawlor, University of Bristol
Teenage pregnancy was the subject of a Social Exclusion Unit (SEU) report in 1999, and a current policy target is to halve teenage pregnancy rates for under 18s by 2010 (SEU, 1999). There is particular concern that the rate of conception for teenagers is higher in England than in the states of our European neighbours, and discussion abounds as to how best to tackle what has come to be defined as a 'social problem'.
Teenage mothers are frequently stigmatised, experiencing what one commentator has called 'social death'. As the number of unmarried mothers has steadily increased, teenage mothers have replaced unmarried mothers as the social pariahs of our time. Yet official statistics on this matter relate not to the current number of teenage mothers, but to the rate of pregnancies, abortions and maternities to teenagers each year.
This paper seeks to estimate the prevalence of teenage motherhood by using available statistics on the incidence of births to teenagers. A model is developed whereby the cumulative total of current numbers of teenage mothers is estimated. Births to teenagers in the current year are added to births to women in previous years who are still in their teens. The model aims to take into account infant mortality and multiple births, but parity cannot be included as the Office for National Statistics (ONS) only collects this information for married women. The results of the model are discussed in relation to the context of policy, values and conceptualisation.
Department of Social Medicine
University of Bristol
Canynge Hall
Whiteladies Rd
Bristol BS8 2PR
Tel: +44 (0)117 928 7353
Fax: +44 (0)117 928 7325
Email: mary.shaw@bristol.ac.uk
Using graphical chain modelling to investigate pathways into and subsequent from teenage motherhood
A Berrington (Department of Social Statistics, University of Southampton), R Borgoni (Department of Social Statistics, University of Southampton), R Ingham (Department of Psychology, University of Southampton), PWF Smith (Department of Social Statistics, University of Southampton), and J Stevenson (Department of Psychology, University of Southampton)
It has been traditionally accepted that teenage mothers and their children are at greater risk of a number of adverse socio-economic, demographic and health outcomes. This paper uses data from the 1970 Birth Cohort Study which has followed up children born in Britain from birth to age 29/30 in 1999/2000, to examine the extent to which poor health in adulthood is associated with a young age at parenthood once the socio-economically disadvantaged background from which teenage mothers are disproportionately drawn has been taken into account.
By using a graphical chain modelling approach we provide an easily interpretable way of describing the pathways through which family background and early childhood factors affect the probability of becoming a teenage mother, and how becoming a teenage parent is itself associated with poor health in adulthood.
Data from the 12 question version of the General Health Questionnaire and the Malaise Inventory are used to identify poor health. Graphical models do not use latent variables and are based entirely on observed relationships. Unlike the usual multivariate regression approach, the graphical chain model explicitly models the inter-dependencies between covariates, for example social class background and experience of lone parenthood. This provides the potential opportunity to simulate, in a more appropriate way, the possible impact of a policy intervention (assuming causality).
Ann Berrington
Department of Social Statistics
University of Southampton
Southampton SO17 1BJ
Tel: +44 (0)2380 594549
Fax: +44 (0)2380 593846
Email: amb6@soton.ac.uk
Family origins of early mothers in Britain and France
Heather Joshi (Centre for Longitudinal Studies), Michael S Rendall (Office for National Statistics (ONS)), and Kevin Lynch (ONS)
Why does Britain have a persistently high level of teenage childbearing, particularly among less advantaged women? We compared two large data sets for England and Wales and France: the ONS Longitudinal Study, and the French Echantillon Demographique Permanent (EDP), which link births to census records.
They provide evidence on the social characteristics of two generations in the same family, enabling us to enquire how far British teenage motherhood levels may be due to mother to daughter transmission of early childbearing. They also show how early childbearing may be more strongly socially differentiated in Britain than France. Viewing teenage childbearing as one extreme of early childbearing, we estimated statistical models and simulated the outcomes for 1970s cohorts to quantify the effect of father's occupational status and mother's age at childbearing, on the chances of a woman, in each country, becoming a mother at single ages up to 25. Separate equations were also estimated and simulated for the presence and occupation of the father of the early mother's child in each country.
Centre for Longitudinal Studies
Institute of Education
20 Bedford Way
London WC1H 0AL
Tel: +44 (0)20 7612 6874
Email: hj@cls.ioe.ac.uk
Office for National Statistics
B6/02
1 Drummond Gate
London SW1V 2QQ
Tel: +44 (0)20 7533 5248
Email: Michael.Rendall@ons.gov.uk
The timing of marriage, childbearing, and end of education - new evidence from Census 2001 and Fertility study 2001 in Bulgaria
Elena Koytcheva, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research
This paper draws attention to changes in the timing of entering into marriage, motherhood, and end of education for women in Bulgaria. The analysis includes a comparison of the trends between two periods - 1980-89 and 1990-2000 - which captures the impact of the transition of the country towards a market economy. The differences in educational attainment, timing of marriage and first birth are also examined according to cohort and ethnic perspective.
We use new data from the Study of Natality and Reproductive Behaviour linked to data from the population census of 2001. The combination of these two data sets provides exceptionally detailed individual-level information for more than 11,000 respondents.
For an assessment of the interrelation between marriage, first child, and end of education we apply an event history analysis approach. The transition to first birth and first marriage are studied as two interdependent processes. The first results show that there has been a substantial rise in women's educational participation in the last ten years as well as delay in family formation and childbearing. Women with higher education are more 'non-traditional' and are prone to having a child out of wedlock. This, however, is valid only for the younger generations. There is a delay in childbearing for all ethnic groups in Bulgaria, but the postponement is higher for the Bulgarian ethnic group, compared to the Turks and the Roma. Consequences of our results for rival explanations of fertility presented by economic and ideational theories are discussed.
Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research
Konrad-Zuse-Strasse 1
18057 Rostock, Germany
Tel: +49 (0)381 2081-255
Fax: +49 (0)381 2081-555
Email: koytcheva@demogr.mpg.de