The Own-Children Method of Fertility Estimation Using Stata

Jeronimo O. Muniz, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (UFMG)

This article presents "ocm", a program to calculate age-specific fertility rates using an advanced version of the Own-Children Method, originally proposed by Grabill and Cho (1965). The software provides a graphical representation of average fertility patterns by age over the last 15 years, generates weighted estimates for various population subgroups, enhances accuracy by focusing calculations on biological connections between children and their mothers, and delivers 15 reproductive measures. These measures include total and net fertility rates, mean age at childbearing, the percentage of teenage pregnancies, the proportion of childless women, the percentage of unmatched children, and the replacement level of fertility. I demonstrate the capabilities of "ocm" using 2010 Brazilian Census microdata sourced from IPUMS-International. The illustration estimates the trajectory of race-specific fertility in that country and presents summary measures describing the reproductive behavior of the Brazilian population by race.

Keywords: Data and Methods, Fertility, Population projections, forecasts, and estimations, Computational social science methods

See paper.