In my post on American fertility rates by racial group Mike Keesey asks: ‘It’d also be interesting to see what’s going on within “non-Hispanic whites”.’ One can explore this question in the GSS. Let’s look at ancestry group (e.g., German, French, etc.), religion, belief in God, political ideology, intelligence and education, for non-Hispanic whites. The data is limited to the 2000s, and I also constrained to those age 45 and up. Then I looked at the “CHILDS” variable, which asks the respondent how many children they have. Taking the mean of this value gives us a sense of the rank order in fertility. Note that this is not total fertility rate. That should be clear from the values being well above 2 in most cases. Additionally, I recombined some categories, so that “British” is the amalgamation of English, Scottish and Welsh ancestry. The “Irish” class almost certainly includes both Scotch-Irish (doing the regional and religious breakdown this seems obvious), and the Irish without modifiers. For intelligence I used “WORDSUM”. The variables I input into the GSS can be found at the bottom of the post so you can replicate.
| Mean # of children | N | |
| Ancestry | ||
| German | 2.47 | 911 |
| French | 2.43 | 169 |
| Nordic | 2.22 | 277 |
| Irish | 2.36 | 759 |
| Italian | 2.18 | 311 |
| British | 2.26 | 1033 |
| Intelligence | ||
| Low intelligence | 2.45 | 287 |
| Average intelligence | 2.39 | 1153 |
| Above average intelligence | 2.19 | 709 |
| Highest educational attainment | ||
| Less than high school | 2.93 | 720 |
| High school | 2.37 | 2970 |
| Junior college | 2.25 | 412 |
| Bachelor | 2.03 | 952 |
| Graduate | 1.93 | 687 |
| Political ideology | ||
| Liberal | 1.99 | 954 |
| Moderate | 2.37 | 1690 |
| Conservative | 2.43 | 1855 |
| Religious preference | ||
| Protestant | 2.39 | 3355 |
| Catholic | 2.53 | 1342 |
| Jewish | 1.83 | 155 |
| No religion | 1.78 | 639 |
I believe much of the difference among white non-Hispanics by ancestry is caused by other variables. In particular, the low values for Italians is probably a function of their disproportionately urban residence patterns in comparison to German Americans. Other white ethnic groups (the sample sizes were smaller for these constraints) with a strong urban bias show the same pattern.
To replicate, go to http://sda.berkeley.edu/cgi-bin/hsda?harcsda+gss08.
Under “Analysis” at the top left select “Comparison of Means.”
Dependent: CHILDS
Row: WORDSUM(r:0-4″Low intelligence”;5-7″Average intelligence”;8-10″Above average intelligence”) DEGREE GOD(r:1-2″Atheist and Agnostic”;3″Higher Power”;4-6″Believe in God”) polviews(r:1-3″Liberal”;4″Moderate”;5-7″Conservative”) RELIG ETHNIC(r:2,11″German”;3,10″French”;7,9,19,26″Nordic”;14″Irish”;15″Italian”;8,24″British”)
German = Germany + Austria
French = France + French Canadian
Nordic = Norway, Denmark, Sweden and Finland
British = Scottish, English and Welsh