Age, Time, and Fertility

Age, Time, and Fertility: Applications of Exploratory Data Analysis describes change in the age pattern of fertility that responds to a specific need in making fertility comparisons across time and place. This book discusses a modeling process based on Tukey's exploratory data analysis (EDA) methods, which is proved very effective in other fields for detecting underlying patterns, even in flawed data. The first part of this text provides an introduction to the philosophy and tools of EDA and to the data analyzed, examining in detail the process of developing and standardizing the closely fitting, few-parameter descriptions of demographic change in time sequence. The rest of the chapters examine the results and applications of fertility modeling and establish relations between change in the age pattern of fertility and level of fertility. This publication is intended for those interested in the measures and methods of fertility change that can be applied to demographic data.