Early stopping英文学习资料.pdfVIP

Birthspacing and early stopping behavior in Xiaoshan County, Zhejiang Province, China 1,2,3 2 1,2 Darryl J Holman , Han Hua , Stevan Harrell 1 Department of Anthropology 2 Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology 3 Center for Statistics and the Social Sciences University of Washington Seattle, WA 98195 USA ABSTRACT A long-standing controversy has recently reemerged over presence or absence of deliberate fertility control in late-traditional China. One side maintains that Chinese fertility patterns can be explained only by deliberate fertility control. The other side holds that fertility in traditional China was limited by Malthusian positive checks, and that there is neither statistical nor cultural support for fertility control. We contribute to this debate in the form of new empirical data and a new statistical method for evaluating birthspacing and stopping behavior. The data come from genealogical books compiled and revised between 1400 and 1930 from Xiaoshan County, Zhejiang Province. The genealogies were used to reconstruct the number and birthspacing between sons who survive to adulthood for women who had at least one son. We begin with the culturally-grounded contention that should couples limit their fertility, they will do so after reached a desired number of sons. We hypothesize that the distribution of these surviving-son birth intervals for a given maternal age and the fra