FAMILY LIFE CYCLE AS AN INDEPENDENT VARIABLE.

This article focuses on family life cycle as an independent demographic variable. Demographic variables, all too frequently, are used as independent variables in a mechanical way, without theory to guide in the selection of the variables appropriate to the study of the dependent variable under consideration, and without theory to guide the definitions of the variables themselves. This is primarily due to the fact that data used in demographic research were collected primarily for other purposes. To pay close attention to the meaning of the variables, it is important in using demographic variables as predictors of behavior. Moreover, age of person or of the head of a family is a traditional variable. It has several advantages such as uniformity of measurement, relatively easy and uniform acceptance and the fact that it is a continuous metric scale. The advantage of age as a metric scale may be considerable when one works out formal correlations. But this advantage of age is not obtained when the results are analyzed and presented only in tables showing age in class intervals. This article proposes the family life cycle as an alternative variable and shows some of its advantages, particularly in its greater explanatory power illustrated with several dependent variables.