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From Some to None? Fertility Expectation Dynamics of Permanently Childless Women

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Demography

Abstract

Permanent childlessness is increasingly acknowledged as an outcome of a dynamic, context-dependent process, but few studies have integrated a life course framework to investigate the complex pathways leading to childlessness. This study focuses on an understudied yet revealing dimension of why individuals remain childless: stated fertility expectations over the life course. Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 cohort, I use a combination of sequence analysis, data-driven clustering techniques, and multivariable regression models to identify and describe groups of permanently childless women who follow similar trajectories of stated fertility expectations. Results indicate that a little more than one-half (56 %) of eventually childless women fall into a cluster where childlessness is expected before age 30. Women in the remaining clusters (44 %) transition to expecting childlessness later in the life course but are differentiated by the types of trajectories that precede the emergence of a childless expectation. Results from multivariable regression show that several respondent characteristics, including race/ethnicity, education, and marital history, predict cluster membership. Taken together, these findings add to a growing body of literature that provides a more nuanced description of permanently childless women and motivates further research that integrates interdependencies between life course domains and fertility expectations and decision-making of those who remain childless.

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Notes

  1. Although both sequence analysis and latent class growth models are used to describe life course dynamics, I choose to use sequence analysis, in part, to provide a more granular lens with which to view fertility expectation trajectories. In addition, prior research using real and simulated life course data has found that although both sequence analysis and latent class analysis techniques yield similar results in classifying life course trajectories, sequence analysis performs somewhat better when variations in sequences are linked with timing (Barban and Billari 2012), as is the case with the current study.

  2. The question does not distinguish between expecting to have biological or nonbiological children.

  3. Just over 10 % of the sample have a missing state at this age because they entered the study after 21.

  4. The five Likert scale items are (1) “A woman’s place is in the home, not in the office or shop;” (2) “A wife who carries out her full family responsibilities doesn’t have time for outside employment;” (3) “The employment of wives leads to more juvenile delinquency;” (4) “Women are much happier if they stay at home and take care of their children;” and (5) “It is much better for everyone concerned if the man is the achiever outside the home and the woman takes care of the home and family.”

  5. The employment status recode used to generate employment summary scores was not available after 1998, when participants were aged 34–41; thus, the age range used ends at age 35.

  6. I choose binary logistic regression, rather than multinomial logistic regression, to facilitate interpretation of predictors across a large number of groups. This approach yields substantively similar results to the more detailed multinomial results but offers a more straightforward interpretation of relationships between individual-level characteristics and cluster membership.

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Acknowledgments

I am grateful for helpful feedback from Joshua Goldstein and Jennifer Johnson-Hanks. Research reported in this publication was supported by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health & Human Development of the National Institutes of Health under Award Number T32-HD007275. The content is solely the responsibility of the author and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.

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  1. Department of Family, Population & Preventive Medicine, Program in Public Health, Stony Brook University, 101 Nicolls Road, Health Sciences Center, Level 3, Room 071, Stony Brook, NY, 11794-8338, USA

    Alison Gemmill

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Correspondence to Alison Gemmill.

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Gemmill, A. From Some to None? Fertility Expectation Dynamics of Permanently Childless Women. Demography 56, 129–149 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13524-018-0739-7

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