At the Turkish wedding that I was at last Saturday, I met a lot of women my age. It was nice to talk some Turkish again although I did notice one thing that I wasn't expecting. For each person that I met, as soon as they found out I was married, they asked me where my children were.This insight in what expectations there are on a young woman made me want to look up some comparison between Sweden and Turkey when it comes to average age for a woman's first child.
This turned out to be harder than I expected. Swedes have a bit of a fetish when it comes to statistics which means when it comes to data concerning Swedes there is LOADS! Statistiska Centralbyrån (meaning the Central Bureaucracy for Statistics) have an absolutely wonderful website for all those gory details that everyone wants to know about. I easily found out that the average age for the women having their first child in Stockholm as of 2011 is 31,24 years and it has risen from 28,42 since 1990.
Finding this information for the Turkish population was not easy. After a few rounds googling, clicking around different reports and reading references, I found the Turkish Journal of Population Studies located at Hacettepe University. It distinctly specifies that it was founded to meet the deficit in the field of population science. It has interesting reports and studies but no database where you can extract the information that you want. In the end, all I could find was median numbers which specified that across the ages of population 25-49, the average age of women for their first child was about 21,3 in 1998, 21.8 in year 2003 and 22,3 in 2008 (Linear growth!) I cannot compare median numbers with average numbers so instead I'll just include the nice excel graph I created using the data from the Statistiska Centralbyrån.
If anyone knows where I can get average numbers for the Turkish population, especially divided by district please contact me, would love to know :-)
This turned out to be harder than I expected. Swedes have a bit of a fetish when it comes to statistics which means when it comes to data concerning Swedes there is LOADS! Statistiska Centralbyrån (meaning the Central Bureaucracy for Statistics) have an absolutely wonderful website for all those gory details that everyone wants to know about. I easily found out that the average age for the women having their first child in Stockholm as of 2011 is 31,24 years and it has risen from 28,42 since 1990.
Finding this information for the Turkish population was not easy. After a few rounds googling, clicking around different reports and reading references, I found the Turkish Journal of Population Studies located at Hacettepe University. It distinctly specifies that it was founded to meet the deficit in the field of population science. It has interesting reports and studies but no database where you can extract the information that you want. In the end, all I could find was median numbers which specified that across the ages of population 25-49, the average age of women for their first child was about 21,3 in 1998, 21.8 in year 2003 and 22,3 in 2008 (Linear growth!) I cannot compare median numbers with average numbers so instead I'll just include the nice excel graph I created using the data from the Statistiska Centralbyrån.
If anyone knows where I can get average numbers for the Turkish population, especially divided by district please contact me, would love to know :-)
Jag blir gärna farmor när som helst :) /Svärmor
ReplyDeleteHahaha! Du få nog minsann vänta! :)
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