Valenzuela, Gabriel Estrella
(1991)
Fertility and migration: A proximate determinants analysis in the case of Baja California, Mexico.
PhD thesis, London School of Economics and Political Science.
Abstract
Previous studies have suggested four hypotheses regarding the outcomes in the migration-fertility relation (i.e. 'socialization', 'adaptation', 'selectivity', and 'disruption' effects). However, there has been a lack of attention to the intervening mechanisms that help to understand the interaction between social factors and the reproductive patterns of migrants, and that has led to contradictory findings. In this thesis a Proximate Determinants approach is used as the appropriate analytical framework to elucidate the interaction between geographical mobility and reproductive behaviour, and its macro-demographic policy implications. This framework is used to analyze the reproductive behaviour of the migrant and native groups of Baja California, Mexico. The main data source used for this analysis is the 1986 Baja California Demographic Survey (BCDS), which was based on a probability self-weighted multi-stage household sample, selected from four independent Municipal sampling frames. In relation to those groups of the population of Baja California, the two main findings of this study are: i) patterns of marriage, contraceptive use and effectiveness, and the practise of breast-feeding amongst the native group seem to reflect a more 'modernized' attitude toward fertility behaviour, since in relation to the migrant group, lower proportions marry and they marry at older ages; higher proportions use contraception, and; fewer breast-feed and for shorter periods than their migrant counterparts, and; ii) regardless of birth-cohort, migrant women who spend their formative period in a rural environment, are more likely to achieve 'high' marital cumulative-fertility than native women in the same birth-cohort who spent their formative period in a urban setting and, furthermore, after controlling for education there is no evidence that within a given birth-cohort, migrants with longer periods of exposure are more likely to have 'low' marital cumulative-fertility than women of the same age who had shorter exposure periods to the new socio-economic environment.
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