Fertility in Context

John R. Weeks, San Diego State University
Justin Stoler, San Diego State University
Allan G. Hill, Harvard University

In this paper we compare the relationship of two different measures of neighborhood context on fertility levels in Accra, Ghana. The vast majority of research has employed a territorial measure of neighborhood and assumed that all people within a defined territory/neighborhood/context are affected in the same way by that environment. We add to a new set of studies, small in number so far, looking at egocentric neighborhoods—environmental contexts that are unique to each individual. We employ data from two waves of the Women’s Health Survey of Accra (WHSA) as our source of information on fertility levels. Our contextual measures are drawn from the classification of high spatial resolution satellite images for two dates close to each survey. These imagery data provide a way of contextualizing the natural and built environment within a given distance around each woman’s residence, and represent our implementation of an egocentric neighborhood.