Fertility in Northern Ireland 2001-2011: The Influence of Education and Migration.

This is a development of the NILS022 project where a statistical analysis was based upon a panel of women aged 15-44 over the period 1997-2007 that was constructed from the NILS. A similar methodology is proposed; the statistical analysis consists of a panel logit analysis of whether a birth occurs in a period; the explanatory variables will include parity, duration, religion and locality variables.

The development consists of:

• The inclusion of an education variable using the results of the 2011 census to estimate the educational status of each woman throughout the panel period, 2001-11 (a woman aged 12 in 2001 would be at school then but included in the panel in 2005 with her educational status thereafter determined by her highest attainment in 2011).
• The use of both annual BSO downloads and the subsequent use of months as the units of duration.
• The use of the 2011 census relationship matrices to provide a check upon the parity estimates based on the 2001 matrices plus births.

The earlier project restricted the analysis to the 2001 cohort and thus excluded the effect of A8 migrants. An attempt to measure the influence of these will be made by:

• Comparing the characteristics of A8 mothers with those present in 2001 (age, parity, marital status, whether father was listed on the birth certificate) using the GRO data.
• Determining what information can be gleaned from the BSO downloads with respect to migrants who enter and leave Northern Ireland between censuses.
• Comparing the fertility profiles of those born in the A8 countries and Northern Ireland based on the 2011 Census.

Research Team: Dr Patrick McGregor and Patricia McKee

Organisation(s): University of Ulster

Database: NILS

Project Status: Active

Outputs:

McGregor, P. & McKee, P. (2014) ‘Fertility in Northern Ireland 2001-2011: The Influence of Education and Migration‘ – Presented at Office for National Statistics launch event on 6th March 2014. [066]