1970年代之後，大部分工業化國家的時期別結婚率快速下降，文獻指出，這是由於女性延後結婚年齡所致，而這些變化通常被忽略了。在台灣的例子當中，本文使用Bongaarts和Feeney(1998a, 2006)（簡稱B-F法）與Kohler 和 Philipov(2001)（簡稱K-P法）調整式，分析台灣的女性總初婚率的變化是受到平均初婚年齡與初婚年齡變異的改變造成的步調所影響，或受到1971年至2007年女性曾經結婚比例的「量」的影響。台灣的例子中，我們發現女性總初婚率的下降是由於不同年齡層的步調扭曲所造成，顯示台灣地區女性的初婚率並未大幅下降，只是不斷延後第一次結婚的時間。長遠來說，女性初婚時間不斷地延後，未來不僅將使總生育率持續下降，且亦可能使單身老年人家戶數量上升，值得未來家庭人口政策持續關注。 Since the beginning of the 1970s, the rate of first marriages has declined dramatically in most industrialized societies, the reason being that people delay marriage to a much later age. This paper explores how much of the change in this first marriage rate among females can be attributed to delays, reflected in changes in the mean and variance of their ages at the time of marriage, and how much of it is due to the proportion of women who got married (whether or not for the first time) between 1971 and 2007 in Taiwan. We show that the latter proportion is distorted due to changes in the timing of the first marriage.
