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Multilingual Demographic Dictionary, second unified edition, English volume

Average family size

Multilingual Demographic Dictionary, second unified edition, English vol.
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Average family size  (AVERAGE family size)


Censuses and surveys may provide information on fertility when they include questions on the number of children born to enumerated women or couples, either during the current marriage 1, or overall. The mean number of children ever born per woman 2 or average parity 2 can be computed. The number of children per couple is sometimes called average family size 3. It is also possible to calculate the mean number of births per marriage 4. Special attention is paid to completed fertility of marriages 5, those in which the wife had reached the end of the reproductive years before the marriage was dissolved. The final parity 6 or completed parity 6, i.e., the mean number of children per woman past the childbearing age, is not very different from completed fertility (636-4). The tabulation of final parity or completed fertility by number of children serves to compute series of parity progression ratios 7; these are fractions whose denominator is the number of women with n children, and whose numerator is the number of women with n + 1 children. Special studies yield information on family formation 8 and the family life cycle 8. Among those, frequency of premarital conceptions 9★, birth intervals (612-1) and the age at the birth of the last child 10 for women of completed fertility are of particular interest. More...