Fiji Fertility Survey, 1974. by World Fertility SurveyReview by: Anne R. CrossJournal of the American Statistical Association, Vol. 74, No. 366 (Jun., 1979), pp. 512-513Published by: American Statistical AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2286379 .

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512 Journal of the American Statistical Association, June 1979

measures in the market place. When the standard is altered or open to alteration, the results are predictable: the opposition of organized labor to revision of the Consumer Price Index, the intense congres- sional pressure on the Census Bureau over procedures for preparing the population estimates used for federal revenue sharing, and the continuing debate over the definitions of poverty and unemployment.

The role of statistical standards in social relationships furnishes one reason why the federal government plays such a large role in the production of statistics. Yet this book, mainly about federally pro- duced statistics, does not develop the argument for federal sponsor- ship of statistical programs. It makes note of comparative uses but does not point out that such uses require, for example, that one be able to compare data for Peoria with data for Chicago and have confidence that the differences reflect differences between Peoria and Chicago, not differences in coverage, definitions, field procedures, editing, or the design of tabulations. The book provides many examples of statistical time series, without noting that their use pre- supposes a continuity of statistical practice and care in the docu- mentation of revisions not often found outside the major federal sta- tistical bureaucracies. A theory of the federal role in national systems of statistics would have to pay more attention than this book does to the burgeoning role of nongovernment organizations in the pro- duction as well as the analysis of statistics.

It appears to me that a general approach to the uses of social statistics, drawing on the materials in this book, could enlarge our understanding, strengthen the case for public cooperation and sup- port for the statistical system, and help administrators and sup- porters of statistical programs to be critical and selective in their advocacy.

I would like to think that the educated lay readers whom Hauser wishes to reach will read this book. Whether they do or not, I recom- mend it to any employee of a federal statistical agency who aspires to grades beyond the junior level. The book describes well the high- lights of the data that are produced over a broad range of subject matters, the constituencies of interested persons and organizations, and the sorts of uses they make of the data. It is a fine guide to the environment in which government statisticians work, and hence a valuable aid to the general education of middle-level statistical pro- fessionals, whose craft necessarily induces specialization. Top staff should read the book, too.

If I were a statistical administrator I would distribute this book to advisory committee members. Nowhere else will they find such a compact and skillful exposition of the context of the specific projects on which they are asked to comment. Indeed, the book will be of value to all who have a professional interest in federal statistics.

The book should also have substantial university teaching uses, wherever a teacher of statistics or of any of the substantive topics covered in the book wishes his students to acquire a sense of the riches offered by government statistical programs and a sense of the social importance of the data.

ROBERT PARKE Social Science Research Cotncil

Fiji Fertility Survey, 1974. World Fertility Survey. Suva, Fiji: Bureau of Statistics, 1976. xv + 563 pp. $3.00 (paperback).

This book presents preliminary findings from the first survey to be conducted under the auspices of the World Fertility Survey Program (WFS). WFS is an international project consisting of roughly 40 national fertility surveys which utilize similar questionnaires and data collection methods. These surveys produce estimates of levels and trends in fertility rates, but their primary objective is to generate internationally comparable data concerning differentials in fertility among subgroups of the population and to examine factors which might cause these differentials.

Two standard WFS questionnaires were used in the Fiji survey- the short household schedule designed to elicit basic demographic data for all household members, and the longer core questionnaire used for eligible women (in Fiji, ever-married women aged 15 to 50). The core questionnaire includes a detailed maternity history and questions on a wide variety of background variables such as education, resi- dence, contraceptive use, work history, marital history, and hus- band's background. Modules, or subsets of questions on specific topics such as mortality, abortion, and availability of contraception,

have also been developed by WFS, but none of them was tested in the Fiji project. Because it was the first WFS country effort, the Fiji survey was a pilot study to test not only the questionnaires but the WFS machinery in general, such as sampling procedures, survey organization, staffing, and analysis.

The WFS has a policy of issuing country data in two substantive reports (see World Fertility Survey 1977). The first country report describes the fieldwork and some preliminary results, while the second involves more detailed analysis and evaluation of the findings. The book under review is the first Fiji report, and is composed of a large number of basic tabulations with only tentative interpretations of the findings (of the 563 pages, only 97 are text). After a brief description of the background and methodology of the survey, there is a section on quality checks which includes a description of the post-enumera- tion survey and other external evaluation methods. The major sub- stantive findings are organized by subject matter, e.g., nuptiality, fertility, attitudes toward family size, and contraceptive use. Each text section is linked to a set of color-coded appendix tables. The tables generally have breakdowns by age group, sex, and the two major racial groups, Fijians and Indians.

The report is aimed at two groups of readers: international re- searchers who will take particular interest in the methodological aspects, and local officials who are presumably more interested in the substantive results. On the whole, the authors balance these two aims quite well. They present the highlights of the substantive find- ings in clear language that the layman can understand, without being so oversimplified as to disappoint the more technical reader.

Local policy makers and program administrators will no doubt find the substantive data in the report useful. The surprising finding- that registration of Fijian births might be considerably less complete than that of Indian births-should be of great importance to officials and anyone who relies on birth registration data. Similarly, the evidence that Indian fertility has declined rapidlv and now appears to be lower than Fijian fertility should be of interest to many. Un- fortunately, the report does not present results in terms of the two most universally understood fertility measures: the crude birth rate and the total fertility rate. Were values for these indices presented, the survey findings would be more meaningful to administrators. In addition to fertility measures, there is also a great deal of data con- cerning the prevalence of unwanted pregnancies, the methods of con- traception used, and differentials in use by education, race, religion and residence. This information is invaluable in assessing the Fiji family planning program.

International researchers will presumably be more interested in evaluating the substantive findings in relation to the way in which the data were collected in order to glean methodological information that may be of use in other settings. One means used in Fiji to evaluate the survey data was a post-enumeration survey (PES) in which a subsample of respondents was reinterviewed. Results pre- sented in the report indicate a rather low degree of consistency be- tween reported dates of events, numbers of neonatal deaths, and attitudinal questions. Unfortunately, most of the PES data are pre- sented in such a way that it is impossible to determine to which survey the discrepancies are due. For example, a substantial number of neonatal deaths was omitted from the birth histories in one of the two surveys, but it is frustrating not to know whether the "omissions" are evenly distributed between the surveys or whether a larger pro- portion occurred in the main survey. It would also be helpful if the PES data presented in the report were broken down by race, as is the case in almost all of the subsequent analyses. Admittedly, the numbers are small and subject to large sampling errors, but this could be explained in the text.

Another independent data source was used to evaluate reported levels of contraceptive use. Information for a subsample of survey respondents-most of whom had reported that they had never used contraception-was matched against individual medical records, and estimates of underreporting of contraceptive use in the survey were calculated.

A detailed investigation of data quality based on internal con- sistency checks has been left for subsequent reports. One example is Potter's analysis of the maternity histories (see Potter 1977). Re- searchers can carry out their own investigations using data presented in the report, but unfortunately some items are missing, for example, data on proportions dead among children ever born, making it. im- possible to apply the Brass or Sullivan techniques for measuring childhood mortality (see Brass 1975 and Sullivan 1972). Under- standably, most of the data presented in the tables are in terms of

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Book Reviews 513

percentage distributions carried out to only one decimal place; however, this makes it difficult to use in one's own research.

As for evaluative measures, this review would be incomplete with- out mentioning the Critical Commentary (see Sahib 1975) of the Fiji Survey which was written by those involved in its implementa- tion. Not only does it provide further insight into the quality of the data but it is also invaluable for anyone contemplating demographic survey work in the developing world.

In summary, the report is a well-organized, carefully written documentation of a large-scale survey effort. Most survey reports contain only a fraction of the tabular detail in the Fiji report, which will be of great interest to international researchers. The WFS policy of releasing substantive results before completing the in-depth analysis is commendable. The high degree of professionalism mani- fested in the Fiji Report serves as an excellent model for future WFS reports.

ANNE R. CROSS University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

REFERENCES

Brass, William (1975), Methods for Estimrating Fertility and Mortality from Limtited and Defective Data, Laboratories for Population Statistics Occasional Publica- tion, Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

Potter, J.E. (1977), "Methods of Detecting Errors in WFS Data: An Application to the Fiji Fertility Survey," in International Population Conferenlce, Interna- tional Union for the Scientific Study of Population, Vol. 1, 101-120.

Sahib, M.A., Navunisaravi, N.B., Chandra, R., and Cleland, J.G. (1975), The Fiji Fertility Survey: A Critical Coammentary, Occasional Papers of the World Fertility Survey, 15 and 16, April.

Sullivan, Jeremiah M. (1972), "Models for the Estimation of the Probability of Dying Between Birth and Exact Ages of Early Childhood," Population Studies, 26, No. 1.

World Fertility Survey (1977), Guidelines for Country Report No. 1, Basic Docu- mentation Ser. 8, December.

Population: Analysis and Models. Louis Henry. New York: Academic Press, 1976. xiii + 301 pp. $19.50.

This textbook by one of France's most distinguished demographers provides an introduction to the methods and models of demography. The book is intended for undergraduate students with little or no background in demography. Although an elementary knowledge of algebra is in principle sufficient, most readers will have difficulty keeping up with the detailed technical discussion unless they have some additional experience or training in mathematics.

The author divides the study of demographic processes into four steps: (a) observation and collection of raw data; (b) analysis, which attempts to extract pure measures of demographic phenomena, such as fertility and mortality by eliminating various confounding factors; (c) model building to trace the causal relationships among demo- graphic phenomena; and (d) study of external nondemographic factors as determinants of demographic processes. This book deals with the second and third of these steps. After an introduction, which includes elementary chapters on the use of census data and the measurement of population change during a year, the central part of the book concentrates on the analysis of demographic phenomena- nuptiality, fertility, mortality, migration, and the population change that is the result. Much attention is given to analyses based on cohort data. In the final quarter of the book, three types of models are de- scribed: models of population dynamics, covering Lotka's work and some later developments; family-building models which relate fecundability, intrauterine mortality, and the duration of the non- susceptible period to fertility and the waiting time to conception; and nuptiality models. Onlv a small selection of models is presented and the final chapters deai almost exclusively with the author's work, thus limiting their usefulness. Compared with other textbooks of a similar nature, some topics are given more attention and others less. For example, the chapters on fertility and the family are detailed and are especially interesting; however, population projections is not discussed, and divorce, widowhood, and remnarriage together take up only one page.

The translation from French is generally excellent, but it causes confusion in two places. On p. 100, "infecondite definitive" (definitive infertility) is translated incorrectly as definitive sterility and on pp. 204-208, "intervalles a cheval" should have been translated as straddling intervals instead of as truncated intervals.

It is obvious that the author is an excellent teacher. The material is carefully organized and its presentation is concise and clear. Numerical examples are given throughout the text and the reader is warned about incorrect interpretations of statistics wherever ap- propriate. OIn the whole this is a very valuable book, not only to the beginning student but also to the more advanced, who will gain many insights from reading it.

JOHN BONGAARTS The Population Council

Quantitative Approach to Management. Richard I. Levin and Charles A. Kirkpatrick. New York: McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1978. xix + 625 pp. $17.00.

I still remember the disbelief of the faculty and the relief of the students upon discovering in the first edition of this book a readable noncalculus presentation of the basic MS-OR Techniques. Since then, through the various editions of this book, the presentation has been continuously improved and the list of topics expanded.

The 17 chapters of this edition address themselves to the following topics: probability concepts, forecasting, decision theory, inventory models, linear programming, special purpose algorithms, integer-goal and dynamic programming, simulation queuing, networks, and Markov analysis.

The depth of treatment is far from uniform, varying from a rather light treatment of exponential smoothing, multiple regression and dynamic programming to a fairly thorough presentation of basic inventory models, linear programming and networks.

Appended to each chapter are dozens of engaging and diversified questions ranging in their applications from accouinting, marketing, production and sales to education, environment and health. Cogent bibliographies are appended to each chapter.

In general the book is free of mistakes. One error that is obviously a typographical error is embedded in the formula for the combined estimate of the myiean. The sign in the denominator of this formula appears as a minus on p. 160 and as an equal on p. 180 instead of what should be a plus sign.

The authors' presentation of goal programming, however, is some- what open to criticism on several grounds. The solution method em- ployed by the authors is based on the augmented simplex matrix. Such matrix which includes separate rows for Zj and Cj -Zj as- sociated with each goal is necessary when goals are not additive or for the solution of multiple objective linear programming (MOLP) (see Kornbluth 1973). The authors omit to point out, however, that for the general case the superioritv of the augmented simplex matrix over the regular simplex lies not in any differences in results but in the information obtainable from each tableau regarding goal trade- offs. Also missing is any warning as to the unreliability of results when equations including ratios form part of the matrix.

Finally, the otherwise clear presentation of the numerical example in goal programming on p. 410 is somewhat marred by setting up a figure for the profit goal slightly exceeding the maximum profit at- tainable given the technological constraints. Such caveats are minor though and the text can be recommended for MS-OR classes in an undergraduate business program as well as for a review course at the MBA level.

A student workbook and study guide accompanies the book.

SHIMSHON KINORY Bloomfield College

REFERENCE

Kornbluth, J.S.H. (1973), "A Survey of Goal Programming," Omega, The Inter- national Journal of Management Science, Vol. I, 193-205.

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