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Land use and first birth timing in an agricultural setting

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Abstract

The dramatic changes in the earth’s landscape have prompted increased interest in the links between population, land use, and land cover. Previous research emphasized the notion of population pressure (population pressure increases demands on natural resources causing changes in land use), overlooking the potentially important effects of changes in land use on humans. Using multiple data sets from the Chitwan Valley Family Study in Nepal, we test competing hypotheses about the impact of land use on first birth timing. We argue that while agricultural land should encourage early childbearing, land area devoted to public infrastructure should discourage it. The results show that individuals from neighborhoods with larger proportions of land under agriculture experienced first birth at rates higher than those from neighborhoods with smaller proportions. On the other hand, individuals from neighborhoods with larger proportions of land under public infrastructure experienced first birth at rates lower than those from neighborhoods with smaller proportions. However, the effects of public infrastructure are not as strong as the land area devoted to agriculture.

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Notes

  1. Terai is the flat lowland area along the southern border of Nepal.

  2. Boundaries of the land surrounding these neighborhoods bisect the areas between the selected neighborhoods and adjoining neighborhoods. This boundary procedure gives every unit of land in Chitwan one and only one chance of falling into our sample. This procedure also means neighborhoods in more densely settled areas are characterized by smaller land areas than neighborhoods in more sparsely settled areas. Therefore we always take total land area into account when constructing our measures of land use. However, our sampling procedures produce a sample of the population of western Chitwan and the land associated with the population sample. Our procedures are not designed to produce a representative sample of the land in western Chitwan.

  3. Although using only the pregnancies that resulted in live births results is likely to under report the total number of pregnancies, this strategy was chosen because: (1) induced abortion is not common, although it has been legalized recently (the estimate based on the 2001 Nepal DHS data indicates that induced abortions account for .6% of pregnancies in rural areas of Nepal (Ministry of Health [Nepal] 2002)), (2) the measures of miscarriage and stillbirth are subject to misreporting, and (3) the pregnancies that resulted in live births were accurately measured and are of our greatest interest. Furthermore, the estimate based on the 2001 Nepal DHS data indicates that induced abortions account for .6% of pregnancies in rural areas of Nepal (Ministry of Health [Nepal] 2002).

  4. Because of the potential overlap with the measure of land used for infrastructure, we do not include the non-family service organizations that are actually within the neighborhood to calculate this measure.

  5. There are two basic concerns when using the discrete-time event history models: first, when to start the hazard, and second what functional form for duration of the hazard to use. The start of the hazard should begin when the respondents become at risk of the event. In principle, a woman is at risk of giving birth to a baby when she has sexual intercourse with a man, provided that she is biologically fecund. However, in Nepal, premarital sex is very much discouraged socially and in most cases sexual activities of women usually take place only within marriage. In fact, there is almost no premarital birth in Nepal (Retherford and Thapa 1998) therefore, we start the hazard at marriage. However, starting the hazard at marriage raises two issues. First, on the one hand, starting the hazard at marriage will exclude all unmarried women from the analyses and we will not be able to estimate the influence of neighborhood land use on first birth timing that works via timing of marriage. On the other hand, including unmarried makes no sense when there is almost no premarital birth. Our ethnographic work shows that out of 1,000 unmarried women in our sample, only eight women experienced pre-marital conception, who then got married before giving birth. Next, these women married at different points in time, some were married before the start of the observation period (1997) others married during the observation period. This introduces complication in parameterization of duration in terms of time. To address this issue we treat the duration of marriage before the start of the observation period (1997) and age at marriage as controls and included the time during the observation period as hazard duration in our models. Second, the functional form of the hazard duration. In our models, we have parameterized the duration of hazard as series of dummy variables in 6-month increments. This allows the risk of having a first birth to vary by 6 months. As most women in Nepal get pregnant soon after their marriages, mostly within 18 months of their marriage, this functional form is an appropriate approximation for first birth timing in Nepal. However, we also tested for other functional forms: log function, linear function, and quadratic function, but the results only vary slightly. Therefore, based on the model fit criterion, we chose the 6-month dummies as an appropriate functional form of the hazard duration.

  6. Because some of the variables are time-varying and change over the duration of hazard, we have to choose a time point at which to summarize these values. Here we have chosen the value in the last observed time unit (month) for the individuals who gave birth. For others who did not give birth during the observation period, it is the value at the end of the observation period.

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Acknowledgements

This research was supported by a grant from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (grant #R01-HD33551) and a center grant from the Fogarty International Center to Population Studies Center at the University of Michigan. We thank William G. Axinn (PI) for his guidance and providing access to the data. We also would like to thank staff of Population and Ecology Research Laboratory, the Institute for Social and Environmental Research in Nepal for their contributions to the research reported here.

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  1. Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan, 426 Thompson St., Ann Arbor, MI, 48106-1248, USA

    Dirgha J. Ghimire & Lynette F. Hoelter

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  1. Dirgha J. Ghimire
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  2. Lynette F. Hoelter
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Correspondence to Dirgha J. Ghimire.

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Ghimire, D.J., Hoelter, L.F. Land use and first birth timing in an agricultural setting. Popul Environ 28, 289–320 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11111-007-0056-3

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