For South African adolescent girls, gender violence in intimate relationships plays an important role in their transition to first sexual intercourse (Harrison, Howerton, Secarea, & Nguyen, 2008; Jewkes, 2005; Jewkes et al., 2001; Reddy et al., 2003; Wood & Jewkes, 1998).
However, there is a distinct slowing trend in the transition to first birth within the first 24 months following marriage among those married during and after the post-independence period (1990 1994 birth cohort onwards).
In the model for the transition to first child, this variable is grouped into four categories: "in education", "in first non-employment, but out of education", "employed" and "in higher order non-employment".
Women in the South make the transition to first marriage more slowly than women from other regions of Italy.
The difference between the sequential and the parallel life course careers of employment and family, or between a predictability strategy and a balancing strategy, is consistent both with the observed earlier transition to first birth in eastern Germany and with the rising childlessness and the faster transition to second births in western Germany.
The model suggests that the transition to first conception in Poland is not affected either by employment or unemployment while the risk of second conception is significantly reduced by the fact of being unemployed.
Hank and Kreyenfeld (2003) found that access to informal childcare arrangements significantly increased the transition to first birth in Germany, concluding that availability and not affordability of childcare was central.
Among women with a measurable contraceptive level (ie, where a contraceptive method is recorded at survey), the survival curve for high contraceptive confidence is the highest, indicating the slowest transition to first birth in this group.
There are no pronounced cohort differences in the transition to second birth, although it is evident that the 1941 50 cohort made the transition from first to second birth more rapidly than succeeding cohorts.
The overall aim of the current study is to expand upon this research by examining the effectiveness of the Parents Plus Adolescents Programme as a preventive programme for parents of children in the process of transition to second level schooling.
