Page 50 - IJPS-2-2

International Journal of Population Studies

RESEARCH ARTICLE

Latent class models for cross-national compar-

isons: the association between individual and

national-level fertility and partnership charac-

teristics

*
Mark Lyons-Amos
London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, Keppel Street, London, UK

Abstract: Multilevel modelling techniques such as random models or fixed effect are increasingly used in
social sciences and demography to both account for clustering within higher level aggregations and eva-
luate the interaction between individual and contextual information. While this is justifiable in some stu-
dies, the extension of multilevel models to national level analysis — and particularly cross-national com-
parative analysis — is problematic and can hamper the understanding of the interplay between individual
and country level characteristics. This paper proposes an alternative approach, which allocates countries
to classes based on economic, labour market and policy characteristics. Classes influence the profiles of
three key demographic behaviours at a sub-national level: marriage, cohabitation and first birth timing.
Woman level data are drawn from a subset of the Harmonized Histories dataset, and national level infor-
mation from the GGP contextual database. In this example, three country classes are extracted reflecting
two Western patterns and an Eastern pattern, divided approximately along the Hajnal line. While West-
ern countries tend to exhibit higher levels of family allowances albeit accounting for a lower share of
spending which is associated with lower marriage and later fertility, Eastern countries generally show a
higher share of spending but at lower absolute levels with lower cohabitation rates and early fertility.
Keywords: multilevel models, latent class analysis, cross-national, marriage, cohabitation, fertility

*Correspondence to: Mark Lyons-Amos, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, Keppel Street, London, UK;
Email: mark.lyons-amos@lshtm.ac.uk

Received: May 10, 2016; Accepted: June 28, 2016; Published Online: July 5, 2016
Citation: Lyons-Amos M. (2016). Latent class models for cross-national comparisons: the association between indi-
vidual and national-level fertility and partnership characteristics. International Journal of Population Studies,
vol.2(2): 44–57. http://dx.doi.org/10.18063/IJPS.2016.02.002.

1. Introduction Copyright: © 2016 Mark Ly-
ons-Amos. This is an Open Ac-
cess article distributed under
Multilevel modelling is increasingly popular within both general social science and demography. the terms of the Creative Com-
The importance of the interaction between macro and micro level is recognised within demographic mons Attribution-NonC- om-
literature (e.g., Neels, Theunynck, and Wood, 2013; Billingsley and Farrini, 2014; Perelli-Harris and mercial 4.0 International Li-
cense (http://creativecomm-
Sánchez-Gassen, 2012). Multilevel models seem a natural method to be applied for this research ons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/),
prima facie, due to their ability to partition variation in demographic outcomes between individual permitting all non-commer-cial
and contextual influences, and explicitly model the relationship between individual and macro level use, distribution, and reprodu-
(e.g., national policies) characteristics. ction in any medium, provi-
ded the original work is pro-
Within the longitudinal context, multilevel models have been frequently applied to examining the perly cited.

44 International Journal of Population Studies | 2016, Volume 2, Issue 2