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AbstractIntergenerational transfers are complex processes involving a potentially large number of participants and a range of content, often subsumed as space, time, or money. Identifying the matrix of providers and recipients associated with each "currency" and distinguishing past from current flows and direct from indirect transfers, pose considerable challenge to any survey instrument. This paper proposes an organizational framework for this multidimensionality and then reviews some of the strategies that have been employed by several surveys in East and Southeast Asia to measure key elements of the process.

The smoking prevalence by age of women in China is distinct from most other countries in showing more frequent smoking among older women than younger. Using newly developed birth cohort histories of smoking, the authors demonstrate that although over one quarter of women born 1908–1912 smoked, levels of smoking declined across successive cohorts. This occurred despite high rates of smoking by men and the wide availability of cigarettes. The analysis shows how this pattern is counter to that predicted by the leading theoretical perspectives on the diffusion of smoking and suggests that it arose out of a mix of Confucian traditions relating to gender and the socio-economic and political events early in the 20th century which placed emerging women's identities in conflict with national identities. That a similar pattern of smoking is evident in Japan and Korea, two countries with strong cultural affinities to China, is used to buttress the argument.

Both population aging and the socioeconomic changes that often accompany it have effects on intergenerational arrangements. As a result, assessing the evolving social contract among family members is a key part of the research agenda. Studies monitoring these effects and other consequences are relatively new. Another way to gain insight is through a historical analysis that (a) traces how expectations for old‐age support have changed over recent decades for cohorts advancing through their life cycle, and (b) measures how well expectations accord with actual patterns. This article uses a series of fertility surveys in Taiwan from 1965 to the 1990s to trace expectations for coresidence among cohorts of young married women and to compare these expectations with the actual living arrangements observed in surveys of the elderly in the 1990s. The results indicate sharp shifts in expectations for each of the cohorts as they aged. These shifts reflect a response to respondents' own life course events and the changing socioeconomic environment and show large and persistent differentials by education throughout the period. These factors tend to bring expectations into fairly close concordance with the actual living arrangements observed some years later.

SummaryThe Second Taiwan IUD Follow-up Survey, reported on here, is a representative sample of all IUD acceptors in Taiwan up to the middle of 1966. The data show that 30 months after insertion, 36% of acceptors are continuing users, on a first segment basis, and that if reinsertions are taken into account, the proportion increases to 45%. Compared with extensive clinic data from the city of Taichung, the island-wide termination rates are about 5% higher at 30 months, for first segments, but the all segment rates show little difference at this duration.Termination rates by social and demographic characteristics show that these rates decline with increasing age and parity, as expected. Sizable differentials in these rates were also found when acceptors were classified as to their purpose in using an IUD—for limiting or spacing—and as to their desire for more children. These effects were partially independent of age and parity. These 'motivational' variables were used in cross-tabulations to show how they might clarify the effect of age and parity, as well as to derive a number of other implications for the evaluation and operation of a family planning programme. The effects of education, urban-rural residence, and prior use of contraception, on IUD termination are studied in some detail by cross-classifying these characteristics with age and with one another.Lastly, this study presents reinsertion rates in relation to a number of social and demographic factors. The rate of reinsertion is seen to depend on the type of termination and, taking this into account, to be generally inverse to the patterns of termination by social and demographic characteristics.