Compare methods

	Own-Children Method	Total Fertility Rate
Field	Demography	Demography
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1986	2001
Originator	Lee-Jay Cho, Robert D. Retherford & Minja Kim Choe	Classical demographic index (formalized by Preston, Heuveline & Guillot)
Type	Indirect reverse-survival estimation of age-specific fertility from census microdata	Period summary fertility index synthesizing age-specific fertility rates
Seminal source	Preston, S. H., Heuveline, P., & Guillot, M. (2001). Demography: Measuring and Modeling Population Processes. Blackwell. ISBN: 9781557864512	Preston, S. H., Heuveline, P., & Guillot, M. (2001). Demography: Measuring and Modeling Population Processes. Blackwell. ISBN: 9781557864512
Aliases	OCM, Own-children fertility estimation, Reverse-survival fertility estimation from matched children, Kendi Çocukları Yöntemi	TFR, Period total fertility rate, Sum of age-specific fertility rates, Toplam Doğurganlık Hızı
Related	4	4
Summary	The own-children method is an indirect technique for estimating age-specific fertility rates for the years preceding a census or survey, using only a single cross-sectional dataset in which children can be linked to their mothers within the same household. By reverse-surviving matched mother-child pairs back through time, it reconstructs annual birth rates and total fertility for roughly the previous 15 years without requiring any vital-registration data on births.	The total fertility rate (TFR) is the central period measure of fertility in demography: the average number of children a woman would bear over her lifetime if she experienced, at each age, the age-specific fertility rates observed in a given year. Computed by summing age-specific fertility rates across the reproductive ages, the TFR removes the influence of population age structure and gives a single, intuitive figure — children per woman — that is comparable across populations and over time.