Cultural Changes and Fertility Transition in Iran: 1956-2011

This paper provides research-based evidence to examine the association between family formation, fertility transition, and cultural changes from a demographic perspective. The evidence of this paper is obtained from a country at which one of the most spectacular falls in birth rate ever experienced in human history has occurred: Iran. The country's fundamental socio-cultural changes over the past decades have made it as a unique ‘human and social laboratory’ to survey their consequences on family formation characteristics such as marriage and fertility patterns. As this paper analyses family formation characteristics in the varying socio-cultural circumstances, it also provides evidence for the long-standing debate as to whether culture and religion itself or other factors explain family formation characteristics (such as early marriage, high incidence of marriage and high fertility for women) in these sorts of religious and cultural contexts.