Predicting Mexican-American Family Planning Intentions: An Application and Test of a Social Psychological Model

Abstract

Mexican-American women reportedly have the highest rate of fertility among women of any major ethnic and racial group in the US. However little is currently known about the dynamics of fertility-related behavior among Mexican-Americans in part because of the inconsistent results of previous investigations and a paucity of social psychological research. Utilizing data from a random probability sample of 708 Mexican-American women in southern Arizona this analysis is a test of a social psychological model of fertility-related intentions that has been applied in previous studies of the non-Hispanic population in the US. 3 behaviorial intentions are entered as dependent variables in a multiple regression analysis: intending to 1) have no more children 2) have a child in the next year and 3) have a sterilization operation. In support of the model the results indicate that attitudes and normative beliefs of significant others weighted by motivation to comply with those reference groups combine to explain a significant proportion of variance in these fertility-related intentions of Mexican-Americans. While both components of the model yielded significant regression weights the attitudinal component was found to be a substantially stronger influence on behavioral intentions than was the normative belief component for the total sample. Although the relative impact of the attitudinal and normative components was not altered substantially when income education religion and parity controls were introduced the trend was for lower-income less-educated Catholic and lower-parity women to be more influenced by their normative beliefs. These findings replicate in part the results of an earlier test of a similar model conducted in Mexico City Mexico and add cross-cultural support to the Fishbein formulation in predicting the fertility-related behavioral intentions of women in the US.