Browsing by Author "Abeysekera, D."

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Being realistic about age at marriage and fertility decline in Sri Lanka
(NARESA:Colombo, 1982) Abeysekera, D.
The paper examines the validity of utilizing an indirect measure such as the Singulate Mean Age at Marriage(SMAM)to estimate the central age at marriage in Sri Lanka where the proportions never married have expanded substantially during the past two decades.By tracing the age at marriage of 20 successive birth cohorts from the sample of women in the World Fertility Survey of Sri Lanka itself,it demonstrates that the female SMAM of 25.1 years as claimed in the sameReport is unacceptably high and that the median age at marriage of the cohorts are well within 20 years of age.It is submitted that cohort data provide a more robust measure for estimating prevalent trends than SMAM.The recent fertility decline observed in the country,it is surmised,is due primarily to the increasing numbers who 'postpone'marriage rather than to a dramatic increase in the age at marriage.The latter has been quite moderate at best.Speculating that these 'postponements'are engineered mainly through economic constraints rather than due to a substantive normative charge in society,the paper expects to observe a 'marriage boom'and a 'baby boom'at the first signs of a sustained recovery in the economic realm.
Lifetime migrants and natives in the rural dry zone and urban Colombo
(NARESA:Colombo, 1983) Abeysekera, D.
This paper compares the two dominant streams of lifetime migrants in the rural dry zone and urban Colombo along with their native counterparts using the 1971 sample census data of Sri Lanka.Comparison of the two migrant streams reveal that Colombo attracted more males while the dry zone received relatively more females although both streams displayed a predominance of masculinity,more so in Colombo.Dependincy was higher in the dry zone as was the level of selectivity of single males.Female migrants are more married than males in both streams.Sri Lanka Tamils are the only ethnic group selected positively to both destinations while the Kandyan Sinhalese are over-represented in the dry zone;Buddhists are attracted more to the latter while the Christians are selected to Colombo.Migrants to Colombo,as might be expected,are better educated when controlled for age but the more interesting observation is that the females are better educated than males in the 15-19 age group at both destinations,a drastic reversal of what prevailed 30 years ago.Male migrants are more employed and less unemployed in the dry zone but a greater proportion of the older males have to keep-on working while a larger proportion of them in Colombo enjoy formalized social security benefits;females are relatively less employed and a higher proportion in the dry zone are engaged in home duties.When natives and migrants of each destination are contrasted children are greatly under-represented among the migrants resulting in lower dependency ratios in both Colombo and the dry zone.Among both the males and females the migrants are consistently better educated than the natives in each destination when age is held constant.Male migrants were less employed in Colombo than the natives while the reverse is true of the dry zone.Within each age group,greater proportions of female natives are engaged in home duties than migrants at both destinations.The native females marry earlier and exhibit higher fertility at both destinations.