The 1961 Fertility Survey Analysis

Data Source: The 1961 Fertility Survey
The information on the reproductive history of Italian women collected in the 1961 general census are described in section VI of the census form, “Information on the number of children-ever-born to married, widowed, divorced, or separated women legally belonging to the family”. The section has two parts. Part A, called “Information on marriage”, takes into consideration each ever-married woman living in the family, reporting the date (month and year) of her most recent/current marriage, the possible date (month and year) of widowhood (spouse’s date of death) or divorce/separation, the birth years of parents, and the dates (start and end) of possible previous marriages. Part B, called “Information on children
In more recent populations practicing more “modern” contraceptive techniques, the results have been clearer. The evidence for fertility and relative mortality risks suggests a U-shaped correlation between number of children and mortality risk (Dior et al., 2013): childless women have higher mortality risk than parous ones; women with few children have lower mortality, while women with many children (more than 5) experience higher mortality (Le Bourg, 2007), though the differences depend on context (Grundy, 2009; Doblhammer, 2000). This mortality differential would have caused a selection against high-fertility women in the census of 1961. This would, in turns, have resulted in an artificially lower completed family size for these groups. If we assume that non-educated women were those with the highest fertility, any positive correlation between mother-daughter number of children in our sample, which is biased in favour of educated women, is in principle a strongest evidence that even among the high educated women, there is intergenerational transmission which is not entirely explained by the same level of education, since we can control for this
In 1961, the number of inhabitants of these villages was 903, 2729, 1521, 1220, 4044, 3371 respectively. At the time of the census, the prevalent economic activities were sheep-farming and the cultivation of cereals (Brigaglia 2006 ,2008, 2009). A limited role in the economy of these villages was played also by the construction sector. In Laerru and Martis, small family businesses in the handicraft industry were also diffused; Perfugas was the most oriented toward the commercialization of typical products of the area. These six centres reached the maximum of their population in the years after World War II, approximately in between the 1951 census and 1961 census. A process of depopulation started from the sixties when the settlement of the petrochemical plants in the near city of Porto Torres has attracted population from these centres, thus inducing a gradual detachment from traditional agricultural