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	Bongaarts Proximate Determinants	Mean Age at Childbearing
Field	Demography	Demography
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1978	1968
Originator	John Bongaarts	Standard demographic practice (fertility schedule moments)
Type	Multiplicative decomposition of fertility into behavioural and biological factors	Summary location measure of the age pattern of fertility
Seminal source	Bongaarts, J. (1978). A framework for analyzing the proximate determinants of fertility. Population and Development Review, 4(1), 105–132.	Preston, S. H., Heuveline, P., & Guillot, M. (2001). Demography: Measuring and Modeling Population Processes. Blackwell. ISBN: 9781557864512
Aliases	Proximate determinants framework, Bongaarts fertility-inhibiting indices, Cm Cc Ca Ci model, Yakın Belirleyiciler Çerçevesi	MAC, Mean age of the fertility schedule, Mean age of mothers at birth, Ortalama Doğurganlık Yaşı
Related	4	4
Summary	The Bongaarts framework of the proximate determinants of fertility decomposes a population's fertility into a biological maximum reduced by a small set of directly fertility-inhibiting factors: the proportion of women in sexual unions, contraceptive use, induced abortion, and postpartum infecundability. By expressing observed fertility as total fecundity multiplied by four indices between zero and one, it quantifies how much each behavioural and biological channel suppresses fertility below its potential ceiling.	The mean age at childbearing is the average age of mothers at the birth of their children, computed as the fertility-rate-weighted mean of maternal age over the age-specific fertility schedule. As the first moment of the fertility curve, it summarizes the tempo — the timing — of childbearing in a single number, complementing the total fertility rate, which measures quantum, or how many children are born.