September 30th Class Essay

9/30 essay: Go to the Gapminder data site (founded by Hans Rosling). The x and y axes can be changed with the little arrows. The year can be changed with the slider at the bottom. You can even have the plot play through time. Each bubble represents a nation and can be selected and deselected in the right panel. There’s a two-minute “How to” video at the top as well.

Pick at least one configuration (life expectancy vs income in the UK and Cuba over the past 80 years, for example). Try any combination(s) you like (no wrong answers here). Write what data you are displaying. Write about what you see or what surprises you, if anything. As best you can, connect what you see to ideas in previous readings from Rosling, West, Sen, another course, or from your experience. You have until 10:15.

The configuration that I chose is Age At First Marriage and Babies per Woman over the last two hundred years, and I chose two countries from each of the world regions as delineated on the Gapminder website. The countries I chose are Afghanistan, Zambia, Ghana, El Salvador, China, Canada, France, and Sweden. When I used the plot overtime feature, what I found is that all of these countries started out with a high number of babies per woman, and the age at first marriage varied from 19 to 26. The number of babies per woman tended to fall around the initial numbers of the countries, such as China with approximately five and a half babies per woman and Canada, France, and Sweden with approximately, four, until the early 1900s led to a dramatic decrease in the number of babies per woman and China dropped to approximately 4 and the more developed countries of Canada, Sweden, and France dropped to approximately 2.5. At these times, the age of first marriage showed little change, showing that though conditions changed, such as industrialization, and families no longer had to be big in order to survive, cultural and social expectations around the age of marriage had not yet changed. That is, until the 1950s when a recession of age of first marriage occurred in the more developed countries of Canada, Sweden, and France. However, this is the only “backward” movement to occur throughout the timeline. As the 1970s approached and the countries of Zambia, Ghana, and El Salvador gain their independence (and thus appear on the map as separate data points), there is a sharp and drastic decrease in the number of babies per woman across all of the countries shown on the plot except for Afghanistan, and there is an increase in the age of first marriages as well, again with the exception of Afghanistan. The data ends at 2004, in which we can see the ages of first marriages increasing for all the countries shown, and the number of babies per woman decreasing for the developing countries, while the number of babies per woman for the developing countries is slowly starting to trend upwards again after its long period of stagnation at approximately 1.7 babies per woman.

What I found particularly interesting was the age of first marriage statistic. It makes sense that as the age of the first marriage increases, the number of babies born per woman decreases, both because having a child older leads to more complications for the mother and so it is less likely for a couple to conceive a child and that the child is carried full term, and because as freedoms increase in a country and a country becomes more developed, it is more likely that woman will enter the workforce and might not be having children. Additionally, our views on parenthood as a developed society have changed, and many women no longer see having children as a priority. However, I did not anticipate the spread of data for the ages of the first marriage of women. For example, I did not expect women in Sweden and France would be married on average so late, with the ages being 32.4 and 31, respectively. My belief that this statistic is unusual is largely because of my worldview: the statistic for the age of first marriage in the United States in 2004 was 25.3, and in my experience, many people in the early 2000s got married when they were in their mid to late twenties. However, if we look at the data for the entire world, we can clearly see that as the age of first marriage increases, the number of babies decreases, with a leveling out of children at just under two babies per woman, and it is not uncommon for a marriage to occur in a woman’s 20s or in her 30s. Delving even further, the trend of age of marriage does not seem to follow strict patterns of human development, as developing countries such as Jamaica have a high average age of marriage, and some developed countries, such as the United States, have a lower age in comparison to the overall spread. I hypothesize that this occurs due to social and cultural differences in countries regarding marriage ages, marriage sanctions, and the number of marriages. However, I don’t know for sure and this data doesn’t show the whole picture, so this would be an interesting topic to research. Overall, though the trends do show that less developed or developing countries have a higher number of babies per woman while more developed countries have a lower number of babies per woman, the marriage statistics seem to occur due to cultural and social differences, rather than developmental.