The research design selected for this study was a survey with structured personal interviews. The main dependent and independent variables were ascertained by means of a combination of open-ended and closed-ended questions and a few Likert-type scales. The questionnaire may be found in Appendix B.

The most difficult aspect of this study was to obtain access to the type of population needed as defined by the nature of the problem under investigation. The target population was all married women who were 28 years old or older at the time of the data collection (that is, November 1981); who had been married for at least two years; and who had postponed the birth of their first child for reasons other than infertility of either spouse.

The search for such a population or group was conducted in several steps. First, it was estimated that in 1980, there was a population of 7,844 married women aged 28 to 44 with no children and no fertility problems. Such estimation was arrived at as follows: the official 1980 Population Census figures for ever-married women aged 25 to 44 with no children was 26,148 or 4.8 per cent of the total population of ever-married women (Khoo, 1981: 63). Considering the attitudes on the ideal age to have the first child, discussed earlier (SFPPB, 1979: 39), whereby most women believed that the ideal age to have the first child was 25, it was assumed that most of these childless women (about 70 per cent) would have tried to have a child unsuccessfully and, consequently, no more than 30 per cent of this population would be free from fertility problems. This 30 per cent is equivalent to 7,844 women and, if this estimation is right, they would constitute the target population for the study of voluntary postponement of first birth.