INTERGENERATIONAL OCCUPATIONAL-MOBILITY AND FERTILITY - REASSESSMENT

Examines the relationship between intergenerational occupational mobility and family size: it focuses on the partition of cumulative fertility into two components - intended and unintended births - that may respond differently to social and economic sources of influence. The results of regression analyses of 1970 National Fertility Survey data lend support to Easterlin's relative economic status hypothesis, which advances the expectation of a positive relationship between direction of mobility and fertility, although this pattern is observed only for unintended births. The implications of this finding for certain theories of fertility, as well as for the inconclusive nature of previous research into the mobility-fertility relationship, are discussed.-from Authors