A year ago the Pew Research Center published, "What do Americans think about fewer people choosing to have children?"
Note: This continues a post from the other day, and it has now been accepted as a data visualization at Socius (forthcoming). The paper is up on SocArXiv, here. (Some of this text is repeated from the previous post.)
A year ago the Pew Research Center published, "What do Americans think about fewer people choosing to have children?" One of the findings was this: "Almost half of all U.S. adults (47%) say fewer people choosing to have children in the future would have a negative impact on the country, according to a separate spring 2024 survey." They broke down that finding by gender, age, family income, and party identification. The question was on the American Trends Panel, a sample of people Pew surveys over and over. They also shared the micro data (as they do!), here. That allowed me to look at a few more variables, and also do a multivariate analysis.
Here I analyze the question, "What type of impact do you think it would have on our country if fewer people chose to have children in the future?" The answers range from 1 (very positive) to 5 (very negative), with 3 being neither positive nor negative. Pew combined very negative and somewhat negative. The survey also includes some other questions about social problems, so I was able to compare perceptions about falling birth rates with views on other problems.
Results from a combined OLS model predicting negative views about fewer people having children ("somewhat"- or "very negative"), using marginal effects at the means are in the figure below: The strongest divide on the question is ideological: conservatives think it would be very bad (~70%), liberals less so (~30%). Almost as strong is religious attendance, which church-goers almost as upset as conservatives. Men are also more negative than women, and married/partnered people more negative than single people, as are older people. Also, more education, more negative response. (Richer people are also more negative, as are Whites and Asians, but I didn't include those in the figure for space, as the effects weren't as large.) I combined that with a set of models using assessment of other problems, controlling only for age and partner status by gender. Those are the lines on the bottom half, which show people who view climate change, racism, and gun violence as not serious problems are more concerned about birth rates, are are people who are worked up about illegal immigration and the state of moral values in the country. These are the five problems with steepest slopes out of 16 issues I analyzed (in the paper). My interpretation: It's mostly a right-wing thing, with education as a wrinkle in that.
Details in the paper. My Stata code for this is available here.
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Previously Published on familyinequality with Creative Commons License
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