Fertility Preferences and Cognition: Religiosity and Experimental Effects of Decision Context on College Women

• Author: Hana Shepherd,Emily A. Marshall
• Date: 01 April 2018
• Published date: 01 April 2018
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/jomf.12449

E A. M Franklin and Marshall College

H S Rutgers University∗

Fertility Preferences and Cognition: Religiosity and

Experimental Effects of Decision Context on

College Women

Better models of culture and cognition may help

researchers understand fertility and family for-

mation. The authors examine cognition about

fertility using an experimental survey design to

investigate how fertility preferences of college

women are affected by two prompts that bring

to mind fertility-relevant factors: career aspira-

tions and nancial limitations. The authors test

the effects of these prompts on fertility prefer-

ences and ask how effects vary with respondent

religiosity, an aspect of social identity related

to fertility preferences. The authors nd sig-

nicant effects of treatment on fertility prefer-

ences when accounting for religiosity: Less reli-

gious women who considered their career aspi-

rations or nancial limitations reported smaller

desired family size, but this effectwas attenuated

for more religious women. This study demon-

strates how fertility preferences are shaped by

decision contexts for some sociodemographic

groups. The authors discuss how the ndings

support a social–cognitive model of fertility.

Franklin and Marshall College, Department of Sociology

and Public Health Program, Gerhart House, Lancaster, PA

17604 (emily.marshall@fandm.edu).

∗Rutgers University,Department of Sociology, Davison

Hall, New Brunswick, NJ 08901.

Key Words: culture, demography, fertility, religion, research

methodology, work–family issues.

The fertility preferences of individuals havelong

interested demographers as a crucial element

of the process of large-scale demographic tran-

sitions. Consequently, classic formulations of

theories of demographic change have accounted

for social and economic factors shaping desired

family size (e.g., Notestein, 1953). Recently,

demographers have closely examined changes

in fertility preferences and their causes at the

individual level, drawing attention to social

processes that construct fertility preferences.

Some studies have examined individual-level

changes in fertility preferences and expectations

during the life course, nding that background

factors including family structure and religious

background were stronger predictors of fertility

preferences earlier in life (Heiland, Prskawetz,

& Sanderson, 2008; Rackin & Bachrach, 2016)

and that variation in fertility expectations

increased with age (Hayford, 2009). Another

study examined changes in preferences during

the life course by measuring the prevalence of

uncertainty about preferences at different ages,

arguing that a greater incidence of uncertainty

at younger ages reected a process of pref-

erence construction across the life course (Ní

Bhrolcháin & Beaujouan, 2015). In addition,

Testa (2007) used cross-national comparison of

fertility preferences to examine social factors

related to fertility preferences, including gender

role attitudes.

Journal of Marriage and Family 80 (April 2018): 521–536 521

DOI:10.1111/jomf.12449

522 Journal of Marriage and Family

Within this literature, scholars have recently

argued for a social–cognitive theory of demo-

graphic behavior that uses more realistic models

of culture and cognition in studies of fertility and

family formation behaviors, including the ways

that culture and cognition shape fertility pref-

erences (Bachrach, 2014; Bachrach & Morgan,

2013; Johnson-Hanks, Bachrach, Morgan, &

Kohler, 2011; Thornton et al., 2012). They have

argued that too often, demographers think of cul-

tural factors as a stable collection of norms, val-

ues, and beliefs; instead, a more useful model of

culture employs cognitive models as an impor-

tant mechanism by which culture inuences

individuals’ behavior (Bachrach, 2014). That is,

people interpret the world using cognitive mod-

els (which include schemas, repertoires, and

scripts) that give meaning to events and interac-

tions through cognitive associations—encoded

relationships between concepts in memory. For

example, understanding that a man on one knee

holding a diamond ring is proposing marriage

depends on a collection of preexisting knowl-

edge. This knowledge is organized by cognitive

models that dene associations between con-

cepts, in this case, the concepts kneeling,man,

diamond ring, and marriage. Similarly, desired

family size is inuenced by cognitive models

that dene associations between the concepts

of childbearing, parenting, career, family, and

other relevant domains. A key feature of cog-

nitive models is that they are made salient and

relevant depending on the context an individual

is in (Smith, 1998).

In this study, we draw on these theoretical

insights to examine the fertility preferences

of young women enrolled in college and how

those preferences may reect cognitive con-

gruence or conict between fertility and the

related domains of career and nances. We

use an experimental method to bring issues

of career or nances front of mind, making

them part of the context for thinking about

fertility, and we examine howthese variations in

context affected subsequent reports of fertility

preferences. We also examine how the relation-

ship between context and fertility preferences

is moderated by religiosity, showing that the

effects of the immediate decision context are

shaped by longer term cultural inuences and

identities, in this case religiosity. In contrast

to existing studies of cognitive representations

and demographic phenomena, which are mostly

qualitative, our methods pave the way for future

use with probability samples of populations of

interest. In addition to improving our under-

standing of fertility preferences—a topic of

substantive importance to demographers—this

study provides one model of how to use the

social–cognitive model in replicable empirical

studies of demographic variables.

C  D B

Bachrach and colleagues have proposed that

improved understandings of cognitive pro-

cesses can aid the empirical study of cultural

inuences, such as norms around marriage

(Bachrach, 2014) or sex preferences for children

(Bachrach & Morgan, 2013), on demographic

behavior. By demographic behavior, we mean

actions that are commonly objects of demo-

graphic research, including marriage, household

formation, conception, birth, divorce, and

changing place of residence. Research in social

and cognitive psychology has moved away from

models of behavior as mainly or exclusively the

result of deliberative decisions toward models

that stress the automaticity of judgments and

associations (e.g., Kahneman, 2003). Which

cognitive concepts and associations are made

salient, or “activated,” depends on context, and

that activation is the product of automatic men-

tal processes that largely bypass both formal

reasoning and explicit intentions (Schwarz &

Strack, 1999). Our study draws on research on

cognition and culture in the following two ways:

rst, by considering the effect of immediate con-

text on cognition and, second, by considering

how cognitive models and sets of associations

vary across sociodemographic subgroups that

reect cultural differences.

Accounts of cultural inuences on demo-

graphic behavior need to recognize that the

immediate context will affect how elements of

culture are used (e.g., Bachrach, 2014). Ele-

ments of culture are not static across social con-

texts, but are learned and used by individuals

in ways specic to the social contexts in which

they nd themselves (DiMaggio, 1997). Because

people can be aware of many cultural mod-

els related to a given concept, it is important

to understand which of these models is rele-

vant to them in a given situation. Seeing one’s

boyfriend kneeling in the context of a church

service would not activate the same associations

with marriage proposals that seeing him kneel-

ing at a scenic sunset would. In this study,we use