This study examines the potential influence of both contextual (in terms of social, economic, cultural and physical environment) and individual characteristics on age at first marriage, desired family size, contraceptive use and fertility of a national rural sample of Thai women based on the 1975 data from the Survey of Fertility in Thailand . A model relating several exogenous factors at the individual and village levels to reproductive-related behavior and attitudes is proposed and tested through multiple regression analysis. The results indicate that for each dependent variable the most variance is accounted for by individual-level factors. Demographic individual characteristics have more predictive power than socioeconomic ones. The contribution of village characteristics in explaining each dependent variable, though not large, is statistically significant. Community characteristics generally have a greater explanatory effect on variables reflecting the current situation (desired family size, family planing usage and current fertility) than those reflecting past events (age at first marriage and cumulative fertility). After adjustment for individual effects, the impact of the community-level factors on each dependent variable is reduced substantially. In contrast, the effect of individual-level factors remained relatively unchanged after control for community-level factors. The results suggest that personal traits are more important than environmental or normative structure in determining individual demographic behavior. In addition although the results, to some extent, support the general hypothesis that community characteristics are associated with individual demographic behavior and attitudes, there appears to be no theoretically consistent pattern to the observed relationship between specific sets of community-level factors and the dependent variables. Some interactions between individual's desire for more children and education and the availability of family planning services on current use of contraception are significant statistically. Problems of measurement, especially of community-level variables as well as the limited amount of community level information, may have contributed to the weak and inconsistent associations observed between contextual and dependent variables.Ph.D.DemographyUniversity of Michiganhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/158966/1/8224923.pd
