World Fertility Survey (WFS)
The World Fertility Survey (WFS) was a groundbreaking initiative conducted between 1973 and 1984 that collected vital data on population growth and family planning practices across various developing regions worldwide. Spearheaded by British statistician Maurice Kendall, the survey aimed to address gaps in previous research by gathering comprehensive and comparable information through high-quality interviews with over 341,000 women. The WFS focused on women's maternity and marital histories, contraceptive knowledge, and socioeconomic backgrounds, with the goal of understanding reproductive behaviors and family planning needs.
The findings revealed significant insights, including a willingness among women to utilize family planning services if available, and indicated the impact of birth spacing on infant mortality rates. While fertility rates showed declines in Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East, sub-Saharan Africa exhibited no such trend. The survey also highlighted the complexities of reproductive behaviors and the varying definitions of concepts like "household" across cultures, suggesting that access to family planning services alone might not suffice to change reproductive practices. Although the WFS concluded in 1984, its legacy continued through subsequent surveys, like the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS), which aimed to build upon its foundational data.
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Subject Terms
World Fertility Survey (WFS)
IDENTIFICATION: Study that documented population growth and family-planning measures in various regions throughout the world
DATES: 1973-1984
The World Fertility Survey represented the first time information on population growth and family-planning practices had been gathered from several of the world’s developing regions. Most of the nations that took part in the survey used the information they gained to cope with and plan for population changes.
During the 1940s demographer Frank Notestein and others developed what became known as transition theory to describe how change occurred following modernization and industrialization. Notestein observed that populations were dramatically increasing around the world, especially in the poorer regions of the world, as was declining in the context of high fertility. Concerns about overpopulation were voiced, but the nature of the changes taking place was poorly understood. In the late 1960s a series of surveys (known as knowledge, attitudes, and practices, or KAP, surveys) were undertaken to measure people’s desires to have children, but this approach was soon criticized as inadequate in terms of methodology and regional coverage.
The widely respected British statistician Maurice Kendall, partly in an effort to revitalize the International Statistical Institute (ISI), proposed the World Fertility Survey (WFS) in 1971 and led the planning in 1972. The first wave of the survey followed in 1973. The WFS entailed the collection of data through comparable, high-quality interviews of 341,300 women around the world. The questionnaire was designed to gather information on maternity and marital history, contraceptive knowledge, work history, and husband’s background in order to document population growth and family-planning measures. Households rather than families were surveyed, and only women under the age of fifty who had been married at some point were eligible as respondents. The standard questions could be supplemented by “modules” on abortion and on economic or factors. Hundreds of technical reports and research articles using information gained during the survey were published, particularly in the 1980s. Although funding for the WFS stopped in 1984, similar data-gathering efforts continued through the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS), a program based in the United States.
The WFS revealed, among other findings, that many women would use family-planning services if such services were available to them, that infant mortality rises when intervals between births are shorter, and that breast-feeding can increase the period of time between pregnancies. The WFS also showed that although fertility had declined significantly in regions of Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East, it remained relatively high in these regions when they were contrasted to the United States and Europe. No decline in fertility was evident for sub-Saharan Africa, and transition theory did not account for these regional differences.
Seventeen of the forty-two countries that participated in the WFS included a “community module” in the survey instrument with the goal of determining whether reproductive behavior was related to increased access to family-planning services or was a function of declining mortality thanks to better primary health care services. Although community effects were clearly reflected in infant and child mortality patterns, they were not strong for reproductive behaviors. In particular, it was not clear that access to family-planning services alone was sufficient to change reproductive behaviors. Part of the problem was that certain concepts, such as “household,” had very different meanings in different areas (for example, in some settings husbands and wives had separate residences). Furthermore, the details that respondents provided concerning the health services available to them were often inaccurate. The earliest versions of the less well-funded DHS had fewer questions on these issues, a deficiency that made it difficult for researchers to identify the motivations and mechanisms driving fertility change.
Bibliography
"50 Years, 50 Data Users: DHS Data Drive a Healthier Future for All." DHS Program, 21 Dec. 2022, blog.dhsprogram.com/category/world-fertility-survey-at-50/. Accessed 23 July 2024.
Halfon, Saul. “Contesting Surveys: Co-producing Demography and Population Policy.” In The Cairo Consensus: Demographic Surveys, Women’s Empowerment, and Regime Change in Population Policy. Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2007.
Livi-Bacci, Massimo. A Concise History of World Population. 3d ed. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2001.
Mazur, Laurie, ed. A Pivotal Moment: Population, Justice, and the Environmental Challenge. Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2010.