Neighbors’ Social Attitudes Predict Variations in Live Births among the Amish of Holmes County, Ohio, United States
Demographic Research
Shetler, Anna, and Cory Anderson. 2025.
53(25):773-820.
The Population Structure of the Amish, a Rapidly Growing Ethnic Religion in North America
Population Studies
Anderson, Cory, and Stephanie Thiehoff. 2026.
80(2), 257–280
Research Points
- As Western countries face projected population decline, understanding the demography of high-fertility subpopulations becomes a pressing research priority. This study synthesizes community-specific (i.e. not population wide) Amish demographic research from the 1960s to the present across fertility, mortality, attrition, and in-conversion—providing the most comprehensive literature review of Amish demography to date—then uses these studies’ disparate findings to predict population-wide demographic figures.
- The analysis draws on the Cross-sectional Amish Population and Environment Database-2010s (CAPED-2010s), compiled from 71 unique Amish population directories covering approximately 89.9% of all Amish, the first near-census population database for the Amish and the source of the definitive population-wide figures presented here.
- Amish fertility is characterized by early and near-universal marriage (median female age at first marriage: 20.9 years; 87.1% ever married by age 50), low premarital conception (4.30% of first births), a short mean interval between marriage and first birth (17.2 months), a total fertility rate of 6.1, a marital fertility peak at ages 25–29 (335.8 births per 1,000 women), a mean age at last birth of 36.5 years, and a twinning rate of 12.55 per 1,000 maternities.
- Religious in-conversion contributes negligibly to Amish population growth: only 154 first-generation adult converts were identified across nearly a century of North American Amish history.
- Population exit is concentrated in young adulthood, with cumulative retention reaching 84.46% by age 40; life-table analysis of four major settlements (2002–11) yields a life expectancy at birth of 81.16 years, modestly exceeding the 2011 U.S. average of 78.7 years, while the infant mortality rate of 5.9 per 1,000 live births closely tracks the national figure of 6.1.
Access Related Content from The Project: "Population Structure—Fertility, Mortality, Compositions"
Amish Fertility in the United States: Comparative Evidence from the American Community Survey and Amish Population Registries
Demographic Research
Stone, Lyman, Cory Anderson, and Stephanie Thiehoff. 2025.
52(26):869-86.
Persistently High Fertility in a Low Fertility Context: How Do America’s Amish Heterogeneously Respond to Fertility-Reducing Structural Incentives?
Presented at the Population Association of America annual conference. Atlanta, GA.
Anderson, Cory, George Hayward, Shuai Zhou, Guangqing Chi, and Mary Shenk. 2022.
Collecting and Analyzing Micro Data about the Amish, a Rapidly Growing Ethno-Religious North American Population.
Population Association of America annual conference. Virtual.
Anderson, Cory, and Samson Wasao. 2021.
The Persistently High Fertility of a North American Population: A 25-Year Restudy of Parity among the Ohio Amish
Population Studies
Wasao, Samson, Cory Anderson, and Christian Mpody. 2021.
75(3):477-86.
Reviving the Demographic Study of the Amish.
Journal of Amish and Plain Anabaptist Studies
Colyer, Cory, Cory Anderson, Joseph Donnermeyer, Rachel Stein, and Samson Wasao. 2017.
5(1):96-119.
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