The Differential Influence of Women’s Residential District on Their Risk of Entering Motherhood and First Marriage A discrete-time multilevel analysis of western German panel data, 1984-1999

To begin with, we sketch a general multilevel model of regional social contexts and individual family formation behavior, where particular attention is paid to the determinants of the actor’s situation. Then a set of bridge hypotheses is proposed, on which the empirical investigation of the relationship between properties of the spatial context and women’s entry into motherhood and first marriage is based. Individual-level data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (GSOEP) are merged with a rich set of district-level contextual data to estimate first birth and marriage probabilities of western German women during the 1980s and 1990s. None of the estimated multilevel discrete-time logit models provides conclusive evidence for an autonomous contextual influence on women’s entry into parenthood. We find, however, a persistent regional effect on the risk of entering first marriage, which we attribute to local nuptiality customs. Variations therein, e.g. regarding the timing of marriage, must probably be understood as the principal origin of different patterns of fertility across western German districts. ★ Author’s correspondence address: Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Doberaner Str. 114, 18057 Rostock, Germany. Telephone: +49-381-2081-163. Fax: +49-3812081-463. Email: [email protected]. The empirical analysis in this paper has been carried out during a research visit at the DIW Berlin in July 2001. Kind support of the GSOEP-Team, particularly Katharina Spieß, is gratefully acknowledged. I am indebted to Johannes Huinink and Hans-Peter Kohler for many helpful comments and suggestions. I would also like to thank Francesco Billari, Marcel Erlinghagen, and Jan Hoem for sharing with me their views on earlier drafts of this paper. The views expressed in this paper are the author’s views and do not necessarily reflect those of the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research.