Couples’ socioeconomic resources and completed fertility in Poland

Beata Osiewalska

doi:10.33119/sd.2015.1.2

Abstract

Recently, a growing number of studies have examined the impact of educational level and educational enrolment on the childbearing behaviour of both sexes. At the same time, other socioeconomic characteristics, such as educational field or occupation, are usually neglected or, if included, focus only on women. This study aims at analyzing how socioeconomic resources of both partners in a couple affect their completed fertility in a relatively gender-conservative country – Poland. As a representative of the postsocialist European countries, Poland is an interesting case study, in which women are often double burdened and the conditions to develop a family are more difficult. Since behavioural drivers could differ between parents and childless couples, the Bayesian Zero-Inflated Poisson model consisting of two states (childlessness and parenthood) is applied. The first-wave Generations and Gender Survey (GGS) data for Poland from 2011 are used. The results confirm that including both partners’ socioeconomic resources in the model increases the ability to characterise couples’ childbearing behaviour. In particular, the occupation of both partners occurs to have a substantial influence on their completed family size.

Highlights

A remarkable increase in the formally-achieved levels of education, preceded by an improvement in educational attainment, and followed by expansion of labour market participation, especially among women, are considered as the most important drivers of fertility decline in industrialized countries (Oppenheimer 1994, Kohler et al 2006, van Bavel 2012)
Since the most significant changes in these areas have been achieved by women, the majority of studies used to concentrate on the possible connections between fertility and female socioeconomic status, while male characteristics were commonly neglected and the perspective of couples was almost never considered
A growing attention has been given to the impact of educational level and educational enrolment on childbearing behaviour both for women and men, and the general conclusion of this line of research is that a higher completed level of education, and a longer enrolment in education result in postponing childbearing and lead to smaller completed family sizes

Summary

Introduction

A remarkable increase in the formally-achieved levels of education, preceded by an improvement in educational attainment, and followed by expansion of labour market participation, especially among women, are considered as the most important drivers of fertility decline in industrialized countries (Oppenheimer 1994, Kohler et al 2006, van Bavel 2012). Taking a perspective of a couple in analysing the relationship between fertility and socioeconomic resources, described by educational level, and by educational field, occupation and other social or economic characteristics of both partners, still remains under-researched. This study aims at analysing how socioeconomic resources of both partners in a couple affect their reproductive behaviour regarding completed family size in a relatively gender-conservative society.

Objectives

Results

Conclusion