Cohort fertility heterogeneity during the fertility decline period in Turkey

Abstract

Abstract The decline in fertility, rapid urbanization and the increase in women’s education levels in Turkey are simultaneous transformations. The coexistence and interaction of these transformations is the focal point for the interpretation of fertility trajectories in Turkey. This article explores Turkey’s heterogeneous fertility structure by examining the fertility trajectories of women between 1949 and 1978 cohorts. It also examines changes in these trajectories in light of Turkey’s fertility decline and interprets those changes through comparisons of women whose fertility behaviors are similar. Using three waves (1998, 2008 and 2018) of the Turkey Demographic and Health Survey data, we employed sequence analysis to calculate fertility trajectories and form clusters from these trajectories. The background similarities of women in the same fertility clusters were investigated with distance analysis, and we calculated predicted probabilities from multinomial logistic regression results and predicted cluster membership. The heterogeneous nature of fertility in Turkey during the demographic transition period shaped the transition process and it can be predicted that such heterogeneity will shape post-transition fertility. The behavior of having two children became the norm during this period, and greater spacing between births or even stopping after the first child became a preferred option among educated women who grew up in cities. For women who grew up in rural areas and uneducated women, we observed a transition from higher parities to three-norm.