Refine
Year of publication
- 2006 (2)
Document Type
- Article (2)
Language
- English (2)
Is part of the Bibliography
- no (2)
Keywords
Anticipatory analysis and its alternatives in life-course research. Part 2: Marriage and first birth
(2006)
In the second part of these reflections, we use the connection between marriage and first childbearing to demonstrate further issues involved in anticipatory analysis. We show that an anticipatory approach cannot be used to represent intentionality: People may marry with the intention of having a child, but the analyst should be wary of using anticipatory analysis to pick that up.
Procedures that seek to explain current behavior by future outcomes (anticipatory analysis) constitute a widespread but problematic approach in life-course analysis because they disturb the role of time and the temporal order of events. Nevertheless the practice is often used, not least because it easily produces useful summary measures like the median age at first childbearing and the per cent permanently childless in various educational groups, defined by ultimate attainment. We use an empirical example to demonstrate the issues involved and to propose an alternative "non-anticipatory" research strategy, which, however, does not equally easily provide summary measures.