Urbanization, Secularization, and Birth Spacing: A Case Study of an Historical Fertility Transition

This article presents an analysis of the effect that urban secularization of religious pronatalism had upon established birth-spacing behavior over the course of the fertility transition in the population of nineteenth-century Utah. First, a model of variance in birth intervals attributable to age a...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Sociological quarterly 1986-03, Vol.27 (1), p.43-62
Main Author: Anderton, Douglas L.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Birth Spacing
Birthrate
Case study
Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints
Demography
Ecological modeling
Fertility
Historiography
Musical intervals
Nineteenth Century
Population control
Population dynamics
Population growth
Secularization
Urban affairs
Urbanism
Urbanization
Utah
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Summary:This article presents an analysis of the effect that urban secularization of religious pronatalism had upon established birth-spacing behavior over the course of the fertility transition in the population of nineteenth-century Utah. First, a model of variance in birth intervals attributable to age at marriage, age of childbearing termination, and completed family size over the duration of childbearing thus defined, is presented. Second, this model is elaborated by incorporating five specific hypotheses concerning the effects of urbanism, secularization, and their interaction, upon interbirth intervals. Although a pattern of urban secularization is found, the uniformity of social and behavioral changes suggests that relatively homogeneous demographic behavior was produced on the frontier by the largely external locus of secularizing influences in the mainstream eastern American community.
ISSN:0038-0253
1533-8525
DOI:10.1111/j.1533-8525.1986.tb00248.x