Anticipatory analysis and its alternatives in life-course research. Part 1: The role of education in the study of first childbearing

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 that makes use of the incomplete data most commonly collected. A weakness of the latter method is that to make things work it builds on assumptions that may be unrealistic, and still it does not equally easily provide summary measures. There is no satisfactory alternative to better data collection. 1E-mail: [email protected] 2E-mail: [email protected] http://www.demographic-research.org 461 Hoem and Kreyenfeld: Anticipatory analysis and its alternatives in life-course research, Part I