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|
|Above average intelligence||2.19||709|
|Highest educational attainment|
|Less than high school||2.93||720|
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.”
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