Akbar Aghajanian

Demand or Ideation? Evidence from the Iranian Marital Fertility Decline

Is the onset of fertility decline caused by structural socioeconomic changes or by the transmission of new ideas? The decline of marital fertility in Iran provides a quasi-experimental setting for addressing this question. Massive economic growth started in 1955; measurable ideational changes took place in 1967. We argue that the decline is described more precisely by demand theory than by ideation theory. It began around 1959, just after the onset of massive economic growth but well before the ideational changes. It paralleled the rapid growth of participation in primary education, and we found no evidence that the 1967 events had any effect on the decline. More than one-quarter of the decline can be attributed to the reduction in child mortality, a key mechanism of demand theory. Several other findings support this main conclusion.

Population change in Iran 1966-86: a stalled demographic transition?

A researcher used censuses and surveys to analyze 1966-1976 and 1976-1986 population data to compare population growth and fertility of Iran under the Shah with those of theocratic Iran. Between 1966-1976 the government introduced policies which improved the legal and social status of women and promoted fertility control. These resulted in a reduction in the annual population growth rate from 3.1-2.7%. In fact the crude birth rate fell from 49-42.7. Yet the rural birth rate (49.1) was still 1 of the highest in the world. A rising age at marriage contributed to the fall in fertility. For example in 1966 46.5% of 15-19 year old women were married compared to 34.2% in 1976. In fact the singulate mean age of marriage increased from 18.4-19.7. Further the percentage of women of reproductive age who were married decreased 81-75% between 1966-1976. Moreover age specific fertility rates fell for all 20-40 year old women. Indeed total fertility declined from 7.7-6.3. This was more pronounced in urban areas (6.9-4.4). As a result of the Iranian Revolution and the Iran-Iraq war population size increased rapidly from 33.7-49.4 million (1976-1986)--3.8% annual growth rate. Further the crude birth rate increased 12% (1986 47.6). In addition at least 1.8 million people from Afghanistan sought refuge in Iran. Moreover the age at 1st marriage was not any higher than in 1986 than it was in 1976. In fact the government reduced the legal age to 9 for females and 14 for males. Further it abolished the family planning council. In addition the proportion of 15-59 year old married women only decreased 3% between 1976-1986 compared to 6% between 1976-1986. Age specific fertility rates increased significantly especially for 40-44 year olds (32%). Further total fertility rose to 7 and the increase was especially high in urban areas (16% increase compared to 8% in rural areas). As of the end of 1991 there were indications that the government recognized the population problem and had taken steps to promote family planning.

Some notes on divorce in Iran.

Recent trends in divorce and the divorce rate in Iran from 1966 to 1983 are examined. The data are interpreted in terms of the legal and social changes that have occurred during the period. Using cross-sectional comparisons the author examines the effects of various sociodemographic variables on divorce and discusses consequences of divorce in the Iranian sociocultural system. (EXCERPT)

Recent Divorce Trend in Iran

There has recently emerged an unprecedented increase in number and rate of divorces in Iran—where strong cultural-religious traditions and legal prescriptions and proscriptions have largely mandated early, lifelong marriages, precluding divorce save in exceptional circumstances. This article examines recent divorce trends, along with demographic and social changes that are evolving in Iranian society. Family remains a very strong institution in Iran. However, some aspects of family, including marital dissolution, are changing rapidly, no longer protected by the strong tradition of family morality rooted in social contracts between large extended families. Instead, there has emerged a “developmental idealism,” demonstrated in a strongly secular move toward individualism and self-actualization, in effect altering wide-ranging behaviors including later marriage and fewer children but also earlier and more frequent marital dissolution. Changes in these realms, and in educational and career goals and behaviors, portend a perhaps inexorable move toward individual and cultural modernity.

Event history modeling of world fertility survey data

Event history analysis seems ideally suited for the analysis of World Fertility Survey, WFS, data, which consists of full birth histories and related information, but it has not been much used for this purpose. This may be because event history analysis has practical drawbacks for WFS data, namely partial dates, computational burden, the need to take account of five clocks at once and the difficulty of interpreting coefficients. We propose a modeling strategy for the event history analysis of WFS data which overcomes these problems, and we apply it to the previously unanalyzed WFS data from Iran. This yields estimates of the time of onset of fertility decline and the extent to which it was due to compositional changes in the population. It also enables us to determine whether it was a period effect, a cohort effect, or both. These results would have been hard to obtain using other approaches. In addition, the usefulness of ACE as an exploratory tool for determining the best coding of independent variables is illustrated.

Age at First Birth and Completed Family Size in West Malaysia

The relationship of completed fertility in West Malaysia to age at 1st birth, ethnic group, education, work experience, and number of marriages is examined by multiple classification analysis. In each ethnic group, the net effect of age at 1st birth, after allowing for the remaining variables, is strong.

Continuing Use of Withdrawal as a Contraceptive Method in Iran

Since its establishment in 1989, the family planning program of Iran has taken great strides in raising contraceptive prevalence rate and reducing fertility. The most recent national survey conducted in 2000 indicated a contraceptive prevalence rate of 74 and a TFR of 2.0 for the country as whole. This paper reviews the latest data on the extent of use of withdrawal by Iranian couples and identifies the social and demographic characteristics of women relying on this method. It is shown that women using this traditional method are more likely to be urban, come from the more developed provinces, and have higher levels of education. The experience of unintended pregnancy among withdrawal user is not more than the women who use modern contraceptives such as the pill.

Female Headed Households in Iran (1976–2006)

Here we address the issue of female-headed households in Iran in an effort to discover whether the incidences, causes, and consequences are similar to those seen elsewhere in both developed and developing countries. In the United States such households are not always found to have resulted from involuntary, relatively homogeneous causes, but there is a persistent finding of associated poverty. From Iranian census data including the past 40 years, we found a rather dramatic, albeit not extremely large, countercultural increase in female-headed households; however, such households neither resulted from common causes nor led necessarily to poverty. We consider these results in relation to their implications about changes in family and womens roles in this highly transitional society in which tradition and modernity seem to coexist and family changes emerge slowly and selectively.

Living Arrangements of Widows in Shiraz, Iran

Most Iranian women spend one-third of their lives in widowhood. This situation involves social, psychological, and economic adjustment for women who had depended totally on their husbands throughout their married lives. A fundamental characteristic of Iranian family organization is the limitation of womens role to the familial roles of wife and mother; they are not exposed to other roles and relationships as long as their husbands are alive. Hence, the death of a husband is a crisis for the widow, who then has to adopt roles with which she is not familiar and to depend on herself for esteem. The consequences of widowhood are difficult for Iranian women. This paper, then, is concerned with the adjustment mechanisms that enable widows to pass through this experience. To illustrate the situation, data from widows in Shiraz, the capital city of Fars province, are utilized in the present study. Shiraz, with a population of over 400,000 in 1976 and a diverse occupational structure, can be considered a good representative of the urban population of Iran.

Attitudes of Iranian Female Adolescents Toward Education and Nonfamilial Roles: A Study of a Postrevolutionary Cohort

Abstract We examined factual data on education and work participation of women and attitudinal data on education and nonfamilial role intentions of Iranian female high school students from four ethnically and culturally diverse communities in Iran. These adolescents had been exposed throughout their lives to government policies and legal changes aimed at assuring that behavior and attitudes of young people would reflect true Islamic values pertaining to marriage, childbearing, and household roles. Our comparative analysis of education and career intentions across communities and classes revealed that, despite the conventional wisdom and some speculation by social scientists and journalists, Iranian adolescents born and raised in the first 15 years after the Islamic Revolution demonstrated largely positive attitudes toward educational and marriage roles. Furthermore, unlike in prior cohorts, there were few differences attributable to social class or community of origin. There were indications that attitudes were more traditional in communities with strong tribal social organization, but attitudes in these communities converged toward those of adolescents in more urban communities. Our findings tend to throw into question media images and to some extent some scholarly writings that have suggested the presence of a strong shift toward conservative-traditional roles for women in the Muslim countries. Despite the occasional strong political and religious rhetoric disfavoring womens working roles, it is likely that it is demographic and economic circumstances that deter young women from achieving the education and careers that they favor.