Extended Family Structure and Fertility: Some Conceptual and Methodological Issues

A marked contrast exists between the wide acceptance of the proposition that the extended family encourages high fertility and the scarcity of relevant empirical evidence. 1 reason for this inadequacy has been the failure to deal with a number of conceptual and methodological problems involved in testing the proposition. A preliminary statement of some of these problems is presented. All but 1 of the few studies that has explored the relation between family type and level of fertility deal only with the individual level of analysis and these aside from other methodological shortcomings define family type in terms of co-residence. It follows that on the aggregate level there is virtually no empirical evidence with which to test the hypothesis that societies in which extended families predominate have higher fertility than societies in which such families are uncommon. On the individual level the meager evidence seems to offer little support for the hypothesis that women living in residential extended families have higher fertility than women living in other residential family types. The widespread belief that extended family structure is (statistically) associated with high fertility is empirically unwarranted at this time.