Situating Reproduction in People’s Lives: A New Data Source from the United States

Leslie Root, University of Colorado at Boulder
Amanda Stevenson, University of Colorado at Boulder
Katie Genadek, University of Colorado
Sara Yeatman, University of Colorado Denver
Stefanie Mollborn, Stockholm University
Jane Menken, University of Colorado Boulder

Fertility is a life course process that is strongly shaped by geographic and sociodemographic subgroup contexts. In countries with national vital registration, population registers exist because the national government is the central clearing house for this data. These registers are important sources of information on demographic processes and their life course, geographic and social correlates. In federal systems like the United States, however, no such centralization exists for vital events, and other administrative records must be used to approximate the function of a population register. The method and data source we introduce here, by utilizing administrative records that include nearly all Americans, allows analysis of U.S. reproduction at the population level with geographic, sociodemographic, and life course indicators. It uses restricted U.S. Census Bureau-held data – including Social Security Administration birth and death records, annual residential location, parent-child linkage, and decennial census information – to derive both individual-level fertility histories and age-specific population rate schedules for the years 2000-2021 for the nation and by state, race/ethnic subgroup, and parity, an important life course status. Three applications of this data source are presented here.

Keywords: Fertility, Linked data sets

See extended abstract.