Men and women in the UK want (on average) two children yet many people do not attain the family size they want (called the 'fertility gap'). Partly this is because, for various reasons, many people feel compelled to wait a long time before having children, and older-age childbearing can lead to people changing their minds about having a second or third child, or they find it difficult to conceive.Â
This study investigates the reasons why people feel they need to wait so long. What are the things that get in the way?
I take a novel approach, a discrete choice experiment, to investigate this problem, and I have tested it on a pilot study in the UK. With Mikaela Brough, we collected qualitative data from a series of focus groups to identify the potential reasons, and then we used this data to design a DCE to quantify people's reproductive decisions, their relative value, and how much time they are compelled to (or choose to) give up in order to have those reasons attended to. This has never been done before. The qualitative part of the study is published in Social Sciences and the DCE part of the study is forthcoming.
I hope to scale up this approach in a comparative study with new data collected from the US and the UK with a longer-term vision to conduct similar research in Latin America.
The UK study was funded by the John Fell Oxford University Press research Fund.