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

该项目旨在对德国社会互动对生育率的影响进行全面的量化评估。具体地说，我们问生育在家庭、朋友圈和工作场所是否具有传染性。这些问题源于一个令人信服的理论观点，该观点在最近的生育率研究中得到越来越多的认可：生育孩子的决定可能会通过社会互动在网络伙伴中传播。这一说法得到了一系列新研究的证实，这些研究在不同的社会互动领域内研究了传染病对生育的影响。尽管这部开创性的文献正在稳步增长，但它在关于生育的社会传染方面的知识仍然留下了相当大的空白。两个主要的研究缺陷突出：首先，缺乏识别传染效应并评估其在不同社交网络中的大小的严格测试。其次，有关传染如何运作的理论描述，与对其影响的实证分析仍大体脱节。这个项目试图填补这些空白。为了实现这一点，我们借鉴了分析社会学的框架，这为我们提供了一个新的视角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，以调查不同社会互动领域中传染病对生育的影响。这项拟议的研究将使用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(PIIRFAM)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).