The Total Fertility Rate (cont.)
The use of TFR measures
TFRs are by far the most widely used measure of fertility because they are reasonably intuitive and completely comparable across nations owing to the fact that they have been standardised to remove any anomalies caused by different population structures.
This doesn’t mean that people completely understand them, or that they are ideal measures, but they are very convenient and they are understood “well enough” to be useful. They are often described as “the average number of children a woman has” and that is good enough for general use. But demographers do have to understand what they actually represent and the problems associated with them. A better phrase would be “the average number of children a woman can expect to have, given the current levels of fertility”. Even this is not demographically correct because it does not emphasise that current levels of fertility would have to persist throughout the entire period of a woman’s childbearing ages.
To repeat the correct definition: The number of children a woman would have if she experienced the age-specific fertility rates for the period in question throughout her reproductive life.