Example 2

Introduction
1.1
Recent decades have witnessed a series of significant demographic developments which, for many commentators, reveal a transformation in patterns of relational and reproductive behaviour. Apparently linked, the developments include decline in rates of fertility, an increased incidence of childlessness, growth in cohabitation and in the proportion of births outside marriage, rapidly increasing divorce rates, and growth in step-parenting. The developments are described by some authors as a second demographic transition,[1] to compare with the first demographic, principally fertility, transition at the turn of the twentieth century.

1.2
Of particular interest to this paper is the apparent convergence of some recent sociological explanations of change in family demography and interpretations of change by demographers. Within sociology an influential position is that family ties and obligations appear increasingly anachronistic in the modern age, as current trends encourage, or force, increased individual autonomy and choice and an associated dissolution of prior family forms (eg. Bauman 1995, Beck 1992). Within demography Lesthaeghe has argued, influentially, that ideational change is important to understanding the second demographic transition, with a growing value placed on individual rights and autonomy in the latter part of the twentieth century (eg. Lesthaeghe 1998, Lesthaeghe and Surkyn 1988). In other words the motivations of demographic behaviour are deemed to have changed in recent decades.