Item Detail
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13253
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1
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0
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English
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A Quantitative Analysis of Behavioral Change in the Utah Frontier Fertility Transition : Women's Birth Cohorts, 1840-1899
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University of Utah
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Ph.D. diss.
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"The behavioral mechanisms by which once married Utah couples initially controlled their fertility are investigated. The data are a subset, in which the wife was born on or between 1840 and 1899, of computerized genealogies containing dates and places of many demographic events for settlers of the Utah frontier and their descendants. This population is first demonstrated to be undergoing both a transition to fertility limitation and dramatic social changes accompanying both settlement and integration with the larger United States community. A review of the author's previous research summarizes macrosimulation evidence suggesting that birth spacing was a widespread form of fertility limitation within this population and log-linear analyses suggesting the presence of interactive relationships between religious pronatalism and urbanism over the course of the fertility transition. Following a brief critique of existing methodologies for studying historical birth spacing, detailed tabular analyses and a theoretically derived normative modeling of interbirth intervals are presented. Extensions to this modeling, including a proportional hazards analysis, are used to investigate effects and interactions of religious commitment and urbanism with birth spacing behavior. These analyses jointly suggest that birth spacing behavior played a significant role in the Utah fertility transition, that many previous historical methodologies for studying birth intervals are flawed, and that the uniformity on the onset of birth spacing behavior overwhelms the significance of cross-sectional differences by either religious commitment or urbanism. It is suggested that the uniquely rapid penetration of the Utah frontier lead to a similarity of behavior in a largely uniform adaptation to changing social conditions." [Author's abstract]