How the fertility context from family, peers, and community matter in the reproductive behaviour of women.

Abstract

The observed differences in the reproductive strategies of women have been attributed to the conditions under which they develop (i.e. contextual effects). The main mechanism connecting contextual effects to individual reproductive strategies is whether individuals change their behaviour based on the most common one in the population. However, contextual effects can happen at different levels (e.g. family, peers, community) and how individuals manage the social influence at multiple levels has not been clearly understood. Here, we study how the contextual effect of fertility, at different levels, shapes the number and timing of births of a woman. For this, we present a computational model to understand how social influence connects group fertility at different levels to individual life-history traits. We focus on the mode and variability of fertility to characterise the fertility norm and its strength, and we do so for multiple aggregate levels (i.e. family, peer, and community). The reproductive strategy is characterised by the number of children ever born, age at first and last birth, length of reproductive career, and average inter-birth interval. We expect to show how different combinations of fertility norms and their strength at the family, peer, and community levels shape the reproductive strategies of women. The decomposition of the social influence across different levels will contribute to the understanding of how contextual effects influence the reproductive behaviour of women.