The Contextual Meaning of Fertility: A Survey Experiment

• In Event: 462 - Regular Session. Fertility

Abstract

This study investigates how social contexts can influence reports of fertility preferences. We use experimental design in a web survey to examine how the priming of respondents to think of different social contexts affects their subsequent reports of fertility preferences. Testing nine different treatments, each designed to prime a social context hypothesized to be related to fertility preferences (e.g., religion, career aspirations), we find significant effects of priming on some measures of fertility preferences, but not others. We also find that the effects of priming vary by gender, with significant effects occurring to a greater extent among female respondents, compared to males. Additional analyses suggest that some priming effects may interact with other socio-demographic characteristics or aspects of social identity, such as religious and political views. Finally, we use an innovative measure of cognitive associations—keywords related to the domain of interest elicited from respondents—to explore how priming questions may affect respondents’ thinking about fertility preferences. In addition to the goal of improving the measurement of fertility preferences, this research contributes to a larger research agenda to test theories of culture and cognition as a means to better understand social influences on demographic behaviors.

Author

• Hana Shepherd, State University of New Jersey-Rutgers