Demographic and contraceptive innovators: a study of transitional African society

Summary Data are employed from six surveys carried out in Ibadan City, Nigeria, during two survey programmes: the Nigerian segment of the Changing African Family Project in 1973, and the Nigerian Family Study in 1974–5. A distinction is made between contraceptive innovators, those who use any means to control fertility except the traditional Yoruba sexual abstinence, and demographic innovators, those who succeed in limiting their family size. It is shown that contraceptive innovation is now proceeding rapidly but has little connection with demographic innovation. Contraceptive innovation is a response to social change which has increased the likelihood of premarital and extramarital sexual relations and the desire to shorten the period of postnatal sexual abstinence while not increasing the interval between births. Such innovation has proceeded more rapidly because of the increased availability of contraceptives since about 1960 and because of the types of contraceptives which have been developed since then. Demographic innovation is on the increase but its incidence is still minute. Fertility restriction within marriages seems to take place only after profound changes have occurred in the economic relationships within both the extended and nuclear families which for the first time make the small family the economically rational choice. Such change probably depends more on the import of cultural patterns than on necessary cultural adjustments to imported economic change, but a strengthening of the conjugal bond is involved and this may be hastened by contraceptive innovation. Little innovational trauma or even awareness of profound change was detected, largely because the profound, and even disruptive, innovations are preceding social ones, but partly too because peer group behaviour changes at much the same time.