Fertility and the educational profile in the Czech Republic – new facts

Beatrice-Elena Chromková Manea, Institute for Research on Social Reproduction and Integration and Department of Sociology, FSS MU
Petr Fučík, Institute for Research on Social Reproduction and Integration, FSS MU Brno
Petr Pakosta, MU FSS IVRIS

The exact estimation of fertility based on various educational groups is a key factor when investigating the causes of the extensive and very fast demographical changes which took place in the Czech Republic at the end of the 20th century. The education is used in various studies as an explanatory variable, belonging to the traditional explicatory sociological tools. The question on the social stratification of fertility hasn’t found yet a satisfactory answer in the Czech Republic. We intend to bring new facts to this debate using a unique dataset, which contains all births in the Czech Republic from 1993 until 2004 and linked with data for mothers. The data gives us the possibility to observe a twelve-year section of Czech women’s fertility biographies within a period characterized by deepest social transformation processes. The innovation lays in the complexity of the dataset, data triangulation using results obtained from other empirical studies, and advance analysis techniques such as survival analysis and logistic regression.