Reconstructing long term fertility trends with pooled birth histories

In this paper, we present a method for reconstructing and smoothing fertility trends by combining birth histories from multiple surveys. Data used in the paper come from World fertility surveys and Demographic and Health surveys . This method usesPoisson regression and restricted cubic splines to produce detailed long term fertility trends. In the first part, we present the method and illustrate its application by combining several fertility surveys in Colombia. Next, simulated birth histories are used to validate the method in a variety of situations. Finally, the method is applied to several countries, from various parts of the world, with varying numbers of surveys and with different data quality problems. Finally, these trends are compared with published fertility trends.