Title: Family Planning
Course: UGQuants (SSPS) > Section: Causality

Family Planning

The European Social Survey asks respondents whether they plan to have a child within the next three years.

We could assume that such plans are associated with the person’s relationship status – after all, it takes two to make a baby, and the cultural norm is to bring up a child with two parents. So the following table crosstabulates these two variables:

Table 1: Intention to have a child within the next 3 years by whether respondent lives with partner.

Living arrangement | Plan having a child within next 3 years
Definitely not | Probably not | Probably yes | Definitely yes | Total
Respondent lives with husband/wife/partner | 56.7% | 11.5% | 14.5% | 17.2% | 557
All others | 67.2% | 16.8% | 11.1% | 4.9% | 494
Total | 61.7% | 14.0% | 12.9% | 11.4% | 1051

Data source: European Social Survey, round 5 (2010).

Here we can see that people living with a partner are more than three times as likely to definitely plan having a child, a little more likely to probably have such plans,  and noticeably less likely to say they do not plan to have a child than the other respondents.

Gamma, a measure of association for ordinal variables, takes a value of -0.264. This does not point to a strong correlation, but the two variables are associated with each other significantly (you can run this analysis yourself to check the significance value).

Now, let us introduce a control variable. For which population groups might this association vary? An often used control variable is gender, and it makes sense to use it in this case as well: after all, men and women may have different ideas about family planning (and indeed researchers interviewing couples about whether their latest child was 'planned' have found astounding descrepancies between the answers of the two parents).

Table 2: Intention to have a child within the next 3 years by whether respondent lives with partner and gender.

Living arrangement | Plan having a child within next 3 years
Definitely | Probably not | Probably yes | Definitely yes | Total
Male | Respondent lives with husband/wife/partner | 55.2% | 12.5% | 16.5% | 15.7% | 248
All others | 67.3% | 19.5% | 9.7% | 3.5% | 226
Total (male) | 61.0% | 15.8% | 13.3% | 9.9% | 474
Female | Respondent lives with husband/wife/partner | 58.1% | 10.3% | 12.9% | 18.7% | 310
All others | 67.4% | 14.6% | 12.4% | 5.6% | 267
Total (female) | 62.4% | 12.3% | 12.7% | 12.7% | 577
Total |  | 61.8% | 13.9% | 12.9% | 11.4% | 1051

Data source: European Social Survey, round 5 (2010).

In fact, the association of living with partner and planning to have a child within the next three years varies quite a bit between genders. It is stronger for men (Gamma: -0.302) than for women (Gamma: -0.242). Perhaps men are more likely to start thinking about babies when they have a partner?