Single-child families: Reduction of Prenature Marital Fertility in the Local Population of Southern Central Slovakia
Abstract
Background. The first synthetic overview of demographic research on the single-child strategy was published by Paul Demeny in his Early Fertility Decline in Austria-Hungary: A Lesson in Demographic Transition(1972), which analysed the situation in 17 Austrian provinces (including Bohemia) and over 50 Hungarian regions (ethnically both Hungarian and Slovak) around 1880..
Historical models of single child families have been studied in the Hungarian part of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy (Hungarian regions Baranya and Ormanság and Slovak regions Hont, Novohrad, and Gemer) in the context of assessing the impact of the introduction of Hungarian inheritance law (Tárkány-Szücs 1981, p. 710, Švecová 1989, p. 220).. Ethnographic studies investigated the changed status of farmer's wives who lived in agrarian Protestant areas and spread the traditional social norm of bringing up only one child (Holbling 1845).
This preference for single child family, carried over five to twelve generations, had a negative regional demographic impact (Bodó 2001, Andorka 1981). Objective.
To explore a transfer of cultural patterns of demographic behaviour in the studied single-child local populations (Veľký Lom, Cerovo), both reflected and not reflected by the relevant agents. Methods.
In addition to published and publicly accessible statistics, we will carry out quantitative and qualitative analyses of birth records (see the description of datasets below).. These approaches will be applied both to source materials acquired from the archives and to material gathered in ethnographic field research.