An Empirical Study of the Relationships of Catholic Practice and Occupational Mobility to Fertility

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Abstract
Data were collected mainly by means of questionnaires distributed to a sample of the population of which about 85% were returned. Information was obtained concerning some of non-respondents by personal interview. A total of 3202 couples are included in the study. The authors were interested mainly in the relationships of fertility and Catholic practice and fertility and personal occupational mobility. However 5 other factors were included in the study as control variables for the partial correlation analysis. These variables are duration of marriage, wife''s age at marriage, size of the community in which the couple resided, couple''s socio-economic status, and husband''s national descent as a measure of social status. Catholic practice, as measured by a Guttman scale combining data on husband''s and wife''s fulfillment of Easter duty, attendance at Sunday and daily Mass and reception of Communion, explains about one-half of 1% of the variation in number of children unexplained by the control variables and occupational mobility. The occupational categories used to measure occupational mobility were derived from the North-Hart study. The partial correlation of mobility and fertility is insignificant. Some of the secondary findings of the study may also be of interest when compared with the results of other studies, but it seems advisable to compare these results only with other studies which have similar populations. For example, the mean number of children per couple found in the present study is 3.04, but if this figure is to be compared with the means from other studies it must be remembered especially that all the couples in this study had at least one child and that larger families had a greater chance of being included in the study. An adjustment can be made for the latter factor for comparative purposes if it is assumed that a couple''s chance of being included in the study was just proportional to the number of children they had; the adjusted mean is 2.42. The 1950 census figure for white married women aged 25-39 (86% of the women in this study sample fall into this category), residing in the northeast section of the United States who have at least one child would seem to be the best available mean for comparison; this mean is 2.32 (computed from United States Bureau of the Census, Table 32, p. 106). However one additional adjustment should be made for the larger percentage of urban women in this sample (91%) compared to the census population (80%). Since the census mean for comparable urban women is 2.08, the adjusted mean is 2.19. Apparently the difference between these 2 adjusted means, 2.42 and 2.19, is due mainly to the different religious composition of the 2 populations. If we figure that Catholics comprise about 1/3 of this census population, the Catholic-non-Catholic difference would be about 12%. This percentage difference is somewhat lower than the 18% difference found in the quite recent Indianapolis Household Survey and lower also than the 21-25% differential for the United States, 1932.

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