Suchergebnisse

The paper focuses on some facets of ethical relevance of the many problems the official statistician has to deal with. His work has not to be seen only as instrumental to government activities but rather as guide to knowledge and decisions of every member of the social body: he offers a service in the form of a public good. In performing his duties, he must comply with usual norms of correctness, impartiality, respect of privacy and confidentiality, and so on, but he has also to go beyond to larger horizons. He should certainly care for professional competence in his field, but also be opened to dialogue with other experts, administrators and politicians. He should be able to understand and foresee problems, tensions,difficulties as well as material and spiritual resources of the society in which he lives so to be capable to imagine, plan and create a relevant documentation needed for a better choice of the right way for solutions.

SummaryPostponing the start of childbearing raises the question of fertility postponed versus fertility foregone. One of the limitations of previous studies of 'How late can you wait?' is that any observed decline in the probability of conception with age could be due to a decline in fecundability with age or due to a decline in coital frequency with age or due to both factors. Using data from a multinational longitudinal study conducted to determine the daily probability of conception among healthy subjects, a discrete-time event history model with long-term survivors (sterile population) is used to study the relationship between age and fecundability for childless women, while controlling for the pattern of intercourse within a menstrual cycle. The findings suggest that women can wait until their early thirties to try for a first birth, providing that they are not already sterile, as the magnitude of the decline in fecundability is very modest and of little practical importance.