Females education and the proximate determinants of feretility

Abstract EN

-Using the 1983 Jordan Fertility and Family Health Survey data, an analysis of the proximate determinants of fertility for five educational groups of females in Jordan is carried out in this article.

The survey shows that first marriage among females is a relatively early and virtually universal experience in Jordan.

For all females, the singulate mean age at marriage (SMAM) is estimated at 24.227 years.

About 0.977 percent of females below age 50 ultimately marry.

Index of proportion married (Cm) ranges between 0.319 for highly educated women and 0.825 for those who have never been to school.

Only 26 percent of the exposed women reported current use of an efficient method of contraceptives.

When the average contraceptive effectiveness (e) is assumed to be 0.85, reported current contraceptive use by each group gives an unreliable low estimate of index of non-contraception (Cc).

The overall mean length of breast-feeding is 10.574 months.

Women with the highest level of education breast-feed on average for 9.462 months, while those with no schooling for 11.240 months.

The coefficient of lactational infecundability (Ci) is within the limits 0.791 for women with secondary schooling or more and 0.761 for women with no schooling.

Finally, total natural marital fertility rate (TNM), and total fecundity rate (TF), based on the assumption that average contraceptive effectiveness is 0.85, seem to be unduly high for each educational group