Network Effects on Fertility:The Social Contagion of Childbearing in Three Interaction Domains

该项目旨在对社会互动对德国生育率的影响进行全面的定量评估。具体来说，我们要问的是，生育是否会在家庭、朋友圈和工作场所内传染。这些问题来自一个令人信服的理论观点，在最近的生育研究中越来越多地得到认可：生孩子的决定可能会通过社会互动在网络伙伴之间传播。这一说法已被一项新的研究所证实，该研究研究在不同的社会互动领域内对生育率的传染效应。虽然这一开创性的文献正在稳步增长，但在有关生育的社会传染的知识方面仍然存在相当大的差距。两个主要的研究缺陷突出：首先，缺乏严格的测试来识别传染效应并评估其在不同社交网络中的大小。其次，关于传染如何运作的理论解释在很大程度上与其影响的实证分析脱节。本项目旨在填补这些空白。为了实现这一点，我们借鉴了分析社会学的框架，它提供了一个新的透镜，通过它来看待生育率的社会传染。基于这一框架，我们的项目提出了一套全面的研究，以调查传染效应对生育率在不同领域的社会互动。拟议的研究将使用来自德国社会经济小组研究（SOEP）和德国亲密关系和家庭动态小组分析（pairfam）的数据。

This project aims to provide a comprehensive quantitative assessment of social interaction effects on fertility in Germany. Specifically, we ask whether fertility is contagious within the family, within the circle of friends, and at the workplace. These questions derive from a compelling theoretical idea that is increasingly recognized in recent research on fertility: The decision to have a child may spread across network partners through social interaction. This claim has been substantiated by a novel line of research which studies contagion effects on fertility within different domains of social interaction. Although this pioneering literature is growing steadily, it still leaves considerable gaps in knowledge about the social contagion of fertility. Two main research deficits stand out: First, there is a lack of rigorous tests identifying contagion effects and assessing their size in different social networks. Second, theoretical accounts of how contagion operates remain largely disconnected from the empirical analysis of its effects. This project seeks to fill these gaps. To accomplish this, we draw on the framework of analytical sociology, which offers a new lens through which to view the social contagion of fertility. Based on this framework, our project proposes a comprehensive set of studies to investigate contagion effects on fertility within different domains of social interaction. The proposed research will use data from the German Socio-economic Panel Study (SOEP) and the German Panel Analysis of Intimate Rela-tionships and Family Dynamics (pairfam).