COHORT MEASURES OF

FERTILITY

By SHUBRADIP GHOSH
MSc. Biostatistics and Epidemiology
1st year 2021
WHAT IS COHORT FERTILITY?

A cohort is a group of women born in the same year. Cohort fertility analyses explore
whether current generations of women of childbearing age(15 to 45) are reaching,
exceeding or falling short of the fertility levels of previous generations.

What is cohort fertility rate?

The cohort fertility rate is the total number of children women from a
specific birth year give birth to throughout their lives. It cannot be
computed until the end of their childbearing years. This is generally
assumed to be at age 50.

What is a cohort measure?

This is done in two ways: cohort measures look at a particular cohort across

time and period measures look across cohorts at a particular point in time.
Cohort life expectancy (CLE) indicates how long an average individual born in
a particular year can expect to live
 COHORT MEASURES OF FERTILITY

• Parity Progression Ratio(PPR)

 Parity Progression Ratio (PPR) is simply

1st child

WOMAN
the probability of a woman having
another child given that she has already
had a certain number. This ratio is
normally calculated for marriage or birth
cohorts of women who have completed 2nd child
their childbearing.

3rd child

What is the
probability
of having 4th
child?
completed fertility rate of a cohort
(CFR)
• PPRs are related to completed family size (CFS). Indeed
The rate is generally
represented by a series
of an values where a0
means the proportion of
women in the cohort
who become mothers
and an is the proportion
of women who proceed
from parity n to n+1.
CFS, which is the TFR of a cohort who have completed
their fertility, can be calculated by a rather clumsy
formula made up of PPRs:
CFR
CFSor(Cohort
CFS (Cohort
TFR) =TFR)
a  + a .a  + a .a .a  +
= a0 + a0.a1 + a0.a1.a2 + 0a0.a10.a21.a3 +0 1 2
a .a .a .a  + a0.a1.a2.a3.a4 + ...
a0.a1.a2.a03.a14 +2...3
the products a0.a1, represent
the proportion of women who
have had at least two
children
The PPRs only give the extent to which the women have had their first, second or higher order
births, not their timing. Timing of births has an important influence on period fertility rates. Also,
the spacing can affect the intrinsic growth rate as well as the mean generational length of any
population.
It can provide insights into the mechanism underlying the fertility behaviour of a population by
disaggregating the reproductive process into a series of stages, beginning with marriage and
followed by first, second and successive births
• Parity Progression Ratio (PPR) – An example…….

 Table shows numbers of women tabulated by numbers of reported

children ever borne (Only for women aged 45-49). It is only these
women who provide the data for the conventional PPRs as with
younger women we have no way of telling whether they will go on to
have more children.

 Column 3 is simply the number of women in column 2 cumulated up

from the bottom - this gives the number of women having n or
more births (or “at least n” births).

 The PPR is then calculated by taking successive ratios which give the
proportion of women with at least n children becoming women with
at least n+1 children
 Birth Interval
(Closed Birth Interval & Open Birth Interval)
Any birth interval between two successive births of women of specified birth order, say between 2 and 3, aggregated
over a group of women in a population can be used in a number of ways to study the fertility patterns in the population.

Interval between two successive births

The interval between the survey

date and the last birth of women
who have not completed their
reproduction.

The extent to which family planning methods have limited childbearing and
postponed the interval can be studied by analysing data on closed and open
birth intervals.
 When women stop childbearing after a specific birth order, say 3, then there will be no
closed interval after the third child and the open interval keeps on increasing with time
 Thus the ratio of the average open interval to the last closed interval is an indicator of
the extent to which the women have stopped childbearing with the last child.

Components of Closed birth interval

Any closed birth interval between two successive live births

can be considered to be made up of four components:

(1) The duration of infertile period (mostly due to post-partum amenorrhoea) following the earlier birth

(2) The periods of menstruating intervals following resumption of menstruation following the last birth

(3) The periods of infertile periods associated with abortions (induced or spontaneous between the two live
births

(4) The period of pregnancy associated with the latter child (usually assumed as
9 months).
 Models have been developed for each of these four components and used to estimate the fecundability parameter, incidence of
abortions and post-partum amenorrhoea

The diagram was first devised by the German

statistician, Wilhelm Lexis, in 1875 to be used in the
computation of period and cohort rates.
It provides a convenient way of displaying data Lexis
with the aim of demonstrating the relationship diagram
between periods and cohorts.
The diagram is composed of a grid made of units of
calendar time on the horizontal axis (x) and age or
the intervals of time from marriage or any event on
which a cohort is defined on the vertical axis (y).
Diagonal lines running upwards from the
horizontal axis separate particular cohorts. By
locating data within the appropriate square,
parallelogram or triangle of the diagram it is possible
to give a more immediate representation of the way
in which information on periods and cohorts is
related.
Using this diagram we can estimate three types of
rates, namely, cohort age-specific rate, age-period–
specific rate and cohort period–specific rate.