Overview of the Swiss Fertility and Socioeconomic Indicators Data (1888)

This dataset provides standardized fertility measures and socioeconomic indicators for the 47 French-speaking provinces of Switzerland circa 1888. These variables describe a time of demographic transition in Switzerland, when the country’s fertility was beginning to decline from a higher level commonly associated with developing countries. All variables except Fertility are provided in units of proportion of the population (%).


Study Variables

The study’s indicator variables include:
  • Fertility common standard fertility measure (indexed)
  • Agriculture % males involved in agriculture as an occupation
  • Examination % draftees receiving highers mark on army examination
  • Education % education beyond primary school for draftees
  • Catholic % Catholic (as opposed to Protestant)
  • Infant.Mortality % live births who live less than one year


A pairwise comparison of the variables illustrates joint relationships for each combination of categories:


We can also look at summary statistics for the individual variables:
Statistical Summary of Individual Variables
Fertility Agriculture Examination Education Catholic Infant.Mortality
Min. :35.00 Min. : 1.20 Min. : 3.00 Min. : 1.00 Min. : 2.150 Min. :10.80
1st Qu.:64.70 1st Qu.:35.90 1st Qu.:12.00 1st Qu.: 6.00 1st Qu.: 5.195 1st Qu.:18.15
Median :70.40 Median :54.10 Median :16.00 Median : 8.00 Median : 15.140 Median :20.00
Mean :70.14 Mean :50.66 Mean :16.49 Mean :10.98 Mean : 41.144 Mean :19.94
3rd Qu.:78.45 3rd Qu.:67.65 3rd Qu.:22.00 3rd Qu.:12.00 3rd Qu.: 93.125 3rd Qu.:21.70
Max. :92.50 Max. :89.70 Max. :37.00 Max. :53.00 Max. :100.000 Max. :26.60


Education and Fertility

Looking specifically at the relationship between Education and Fertility, we can see that Fertility generally decreases as Education increases (see graph below). As we observed in the summary table above, the minimum and maximum values of Fertility are 35 and 92.5, respectively; the minimum and maximum values of Education are 1% and 53%, respectively.