© Kamla-Raj 2004 Anthropologist, 6(2): 119-123 (2004)
Does Community Level Mortality Affect the Reproductive
Performance of Women? Evidences from Goa, India
T. S. Syamala
Institute for Social and Economic Change, Nagarbhavi(PO),
Bangalore, 560 072, Karnataka, India
Telephone: 080-3215468; Fax: 080-080-3217008;
E-mail: syamala@isec.ac.in; Syamala_ts@hotmail.com
KeyWords Reproductive Performance. Societal Effect. Children Ever Born. Infant Mortality
Abstract In this paper an attempt has been made to demonstrate the societal effect of mortality on the reproductive performance of women in Goa. Since fertility is a function of persons and environment, the neighbourhood, community or social milieu in which a couple live can affect their reproductive behaviour. Community level mortality index, i.e the cumulation of mortality experience of individual woman has been used to categorise the villages into low and high mortality area. The bivariate analysis show that in general there existed a weak societal effect in the study population and it was noticeable more among those without any personal experience of child loss. Those women who stayed in the high mortality area exhibited a higher fertility as compared to the women who stayed in the low mortality area. However, the detailed multivariate analysis revealed that the community level effect on mortality on fertility was not significant. The individual experience of mortality seems to be more important in determining the fertility.