BOSTON UNIVERSITY GRADUATE SCHOOL THE SOCIAL ECOLOGY OF HUMAN FERTILITY IN NORWAY 1970 by ERLING BERGE CAND. POLIT., THE UNIVERSITY OF BERGEN, 1973 Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requiremants for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY 1981 Copyright by ERLING BERGE 1981 Approved by iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The present dissertation grew out of the problems encountered during my work at the Socio-Demographic Research Unit of the Central Bureau of Statistics. I am very much indebted to the director of the research unit at that time, now professor at the University of Copenhagen, Jan M. Hoem for tutoring me through the basics of the methods of demography. I appreciate especially that he set such high standards of research. I also want to thank my colleagues at that time, Olav Ljones, Bjorn L. Tennesen, and Arne Rideng, for discussions and incisive comments. During the academic year 1975-76 I attended classes at Boston University. The work there supplied new insights into how societies are constituted. I am deeply grateful to all my teachers. Of most importance for the present work were the classes of prof. Anthony Leeds, prof. S.M. Miller, prof. Irwin T. Sanders, and the tutoring of prof. John Mogey and prof. Frank L. Sweetser. Frank Sweetser really started his tutoring in 1970 when I, as an under- graduate at the University of Bergen, was employed by him as a reaearch assistant during his stay there. He gave roe the opportunity to learn high quality research by participating in its making. His continued interest iv in me and the dissertation work in particular and his kind prompting of me to continue as the research work threatened to grind to a halt, must bear the main respon- sibility for there being a disseration at all. As the chapters began to appear in a somewhat disorderly sequence the encouraging criticisms and sensible advice I received from him, from John Mogey, and Micheal Useem inspired me to attack seriously hitherto unnoticed problems and helped me to correct erroneous and doubtful reasoning. The dissertation improved enormously. Friends and associates in Norway have commented on parts of the work as it grew. I am very grateful to Helge Brunborg, Turid Noack, and Lars 0stby of the Socio-Demo- graphic Research Unit of the Central Bureau of Statistics; to Reidar Kvadsheim, Fredrik Stavdal, Eivind Jahren and Lise Kjolsrod of The Institute of Sociology of the University of Osloj to Lars Svasand of the Institute of Political Science of the University of Bergen; and to Kirsten Bjaru, a colleague of mine, at the Institute of Applied Social Research (INAS). Particularly I want to thank the director of INAS, Natalie Rogoff Ramsoy, for her interest, encouragement and comments on several chapters. The librarians of INAS and the Institute of Social Research, Inger Foss and Sven A. Lindblad assisted with, among other things, a computer search of relevant v literature. Eyolf Steen-Olsen of the Faculty of Social Science's Computer Service contributed to the speedy correction of erroneous computer runs. Steinar Mourn and Arne Eidsheim of the Norwegian Social Science Data Services (NSD) in Oslo assisted in obtaining data from NSD's Commune Data Bank. The Central Bureau of Statistics made all requested data available to the research free of charge. The major financial support of the research and studies necessary to complete the disseration came from The Norwegian Research Council for Science and the Humanities (grant no. B.98.74.003); further support came from The Institute of Sociology of the University of Oslo and from the Institute of Applied Social Research. Aase Jahren did an extremely fine job of typing the final manuscript in the short time available. I also want to thank my wife Berit Otnes for quietly supporting the dissertation research by accepting an unequal burden of the daily chores of family life during the extended periods of peak work load. I am very much indebted to everybody who in one way or another has made it possible to complete and improve upon the present draft. I must, however, acknowledge sole responsibility for not always following good and sensible advice and also for introducing new and additional defi- ciencies and errors into the study as it stands here. vi THE SOCIAL ECOLOGY OF HUMAN FERTILITY IN NORWAY 1970 (Order No. ) Erling Berge Boston University Graduate School, 1981 Major Professors Frank L. Sweetser, Professor of Sociology. Few social science variables have received the amount of research and discussion which fertility has, Both time series and differentials of fertility have proved remark- ably resistant to widely accepted theoretical explanations. The present work presents a theoretical explanation of the regional differentials in fertility observed in Norway in 1970. From an actor and exchange-oriented point of view, concepts of social structure and social processes are developed such that they permit factors derived front a factor analysis of Norway's ecology in 1970 to be inter- preted as measures of basic dimensions of differentiation of the social structure. A pivotal argument of the theoretical discussion is the different dynamic consequences for the social structure of exchanges based on inalienable experiences versus alienable goods. From this distinction, two types of dimensions are derived; socio-economic dimensions and community dimensions. After considering how social vii structure so conceived is most probably distributed in space, here defined as the set of communes in Norway, six factors were extracted. Of these six one was a community factor, labeled Farailism, three were major socio-economic factors, labeled Socio-Economic Status/Urbanization, Affluence, and Deprivation, and two were minor socio- economic factors, labeled Manufacturing and Female Economic Activity. The theoretical framework is then applied to the decision-making process in families as it affects con- ceptions and births. The general expectation is that families located in areas having high scores on socio- economic dimensions will find it to their advantage to limit their number of children severely. High scores on the community dimension , on the other hand, indicate a social structure where a relatively larger number of children will be advantageous. Four parameters describing the fertility level and age pattern of child bearing were estimated by means of analytic graduation. The parameters were put into a re- gression analysis as dependent variables with the factors as the major explanatory variables. For the four para- meters, the amount of explained variance ranged from 81 per cent to 94 per cent. One of the more interesting results is that female labor force participation seems to viii have an effect on the level of fertility only indirectly through its effect on marriage patterns and timing of births.One also might note that manufacturing industry has a negative direct effect as well as a positive indirect effect(through marriage patterns).The two effects nearly cancel each other so that the zero order correlation between strength of manufacturing industry and total fertility rate comes out close to zero. ix TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS iv ABSTRACT vii LIST OF TABLES xvi LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS XXiv 1. INTRODUCTION 1 2. THE SOCIAL SYSTEM: STRUCTURE AND PROCESS 17 Social structure 17 Social processes 20 The actor 20 Properties of the choice fuction 22 Types of value 25 Linking structure and process 30 3. SPATIAL ASPECTS OF SOCIAL SYSTEMS 37 Spatial aspects of choice functions and motivational entities 38 Spatial aspects of social structure and social processes 41 The value of land and* the distribution of actors in space 49 x 4. DIMENSIONS OF SOCIAL STRUCTURE 58 The data 59 Process, structure and regional variation 61 Socio-economic dimensions 66 Family/community dimensions 68 System-ecological dimensions; the spatial dimension 69 Interrelations of dimensions .70 Dimensions of social structure and existing data 76 Factorial ecology 79 5. THE SOCIAL ECOLOGY OF NORWAY 1970 87 The variables 87 The units of analysis 88 The factor analytic technique 90 Transformations of variables 91 Selecting variables for factorization 91 Dimensions of social structure in Norway 1970 97 On the validation of the factors 106 Summary of social structure in Norway 1970 110 A parsimonious definition of the factors 111 Fertility regions and the problems of aggregation in factor models 117 xi 6. THE SOCIAL ECOLOGY OF HUMAN FERTILITY IN NORWAY 1970 123 Fertility by region 123 Theoretical discussion of differential fertility 127 The first child 129 Income and costs 133 Work and industry 138 Family 142 Children after the first 144 Marriage and fertility 146 Empirical results on regional differentials of fertility 151 Variables available for causal models of the level and age pattern of fertility 154 Factors affecting the level of fertility 157 Factors affecting the age pattern of childbearing 165 Concluding discussion 177 APPENDIX A : Tables 180 xii APPENDIX B : The units of analysis: the fertility regions 208 Introduction 209 Population size 211 Analytical effects of aggregation 212 Grouping to maximize variation in culture 216 Grouping to maximize variation in economic structure 217 Basic code of commune 219 Type of commune 224 The fertility regions 227 APPENDIX C : A comparison of the factorial ecology of Norway in 1960 and the factorial ecology of Norway in 1970 264 Introduction 265 The units of analysis 267 Definition of variables 269 The substitute variables 270 Changing content of variables 278 The quality of the