부산대학교 도서관

This article focuses on fecundability and its relation to age in a sample of Taiwanese women. Fecundability is regarded as one of the important components of fecundity. The three purposes of this paper are--to show that with the aid of improved measures of contraceptive delays one can obtain a good fit with the geometric model; to present new data on fecundability, comparatively free from memory and truncation biases, at the beginning of married life for a non-western population; and to study the relationship between age and fecundability at the beginning of married life. The memory bias arises because in the Taichung survey the information about pregnancy histories was collected retrospectively at the time of survey. Two types of memory bias which may affect the mean fecundability are--Type A--under-reporting of pregnancy losses, and; Type B--misreporting of the time of marriage and the time of first conceptions. The truncation bias arises because the interview date curtailed the observed childbearing experience of women in the Taichung sample. In estimating overall fecundability women with at least one conception is included; hence, given short marriage duration, a woman cannot be included in the analysis at all unless her first reported conception is comparatively prompt.