Dhaneshwari Sharma

Abstract

The study is based upon primary data. It covered 50 per cent of eligiblecouples (885) of a small town (Kullu) in a hill state (Himachal Pradesh) of India. Itaddresses itself to investigating the role of a variety of demographic, economic andsocio-cultural determinants of urban fertility at microscale. As many as 16 independentvariables related with age, spacing, education, occupation socio-economic setup and mortality have been taken into account.The chief objectives of the study are: (1) to identify the empirical correlates of urbanfertility at microscale; (2) to identify more dominant factors influencing fertilitybehaviour; (3) to isolate those variables which have critical causal effect on fertilitybehaviour; and (4) to measure the explanatory contribution of each such criticalvariable.A product moment correlation programme was run to identify empirical correlates offertility behaviour; the factor analysis was resorted to in order to condense thecorrelation matrix and to decompose variance of ferility into several componentsbased on its association with other variables; and multiple stepwise regression wasused to calculate contributions made by various individual independent variablestowards total fertility level.The study reveals, among other things, that the factors of age at marriage of thewoman, age at first parity, education of the woman and average spacing are the mostcritical correlates of fertility and need to be influenced most urgently in a countrylike India. Furthermore, education of the respondent and that of the spouse gotogether; age at marriage of the respondent and that of the spouse go together; age atmarriage of the respondent and age at first parity go together; and breast-feedingand average spacing go together. All these point vividly to the major areas of concernfor the policy makers of the Third World.

Keywords: urban fertility, Kullu Town, India

R.c. Chandna, Penjab University, Chandigarh, India
Dhaneshwari Sharma, Government College, Kullu, India