Interaction, diffusion, and fertility transition in Costa Rica : quantitative and qualitative evidence

Abstract

This chapter examines the role played by diffusion through social interaction in the Costa Rican fertility transition. The literature about the causes of fertility transition has traditionally focused on the socio-economic and cultural determinants of the motivation for having large or small families. To a somewhat lesser degree, it has also considered supply factors limiting or facilitating access to contraception, that is, the role of family planning programmes. The concern here is with the third type of causal agent of fertility transition, that is, the autonomous spread, or contagiousness, of fertility control. If Costa Rican data support the proposition that social contagion processes shaped fertility decline, then an empirical foundation exists for Simmons’s (1986: 189) claim that ‘programmes may generate their own demand through diffusion from early users to others’.

The earliest fertility studies mentioned the possibility that information flows and the diffusion of ideas contributed towards fertility transition. Caldwell (1982: 128) noted that ‘in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, governments and other institutions almost invariably explained fertility control innovationally, as the spread of pernicious ideas’. Diffusionist explanations have re-emerged as a theme in research on fertility transition since the early 1980s, in part as a reaction to the limited explanatory power of theories based on the supply-demand paradigm when confronted by empirical evidence from the Princeton European Fertility Project or the World Fertility Survey (Cleland and Wilson 1987). A lack of conceptual clarity about the meaning of diffusion and the absence of empirical tests have, however, impaired diffusionist arguments. This study aims to overcome both shortcomings.

The first part employs a simple dynamic model to simulate a fertility transition process with interactive diffusion effects. The second part examines quantitative evidence suggestive of diffusion effects in the Costa Rican transition. This quantitative analysis is supplemented with an examination of focus group discussions held with women in the cohorts responsible for the Costa Rican fertility decline.