Fertility intentions, fertility considerations and Swedish fertility decline

Over the past decade, fertility rates in Sweden have declined unexpectedly. Meanwhile new social inequalities in ultimate childlessness have emerged.

Our project seeks to investigate these puzzling developments and to identify their driving factors with novel theoretical and mixed-methods approaches.

We analyze register-linked data of the new Swedish Generations and Gender Survey (GGS2020) and its predecessor, the GGS2012, complemented with qualitative interviews from 2012 and 2022.

Based on survey and register data we compare changes in fertility intentions and their realizations among Swedish women and men over the recent period of fertility decline, and the mechanisms behind.

We study linkages to employment, education, partnership life courses, as well as attitudes and perceptions of (in)securities to assess the role of structural and subjective factors with respect to fertility intentions and positive as well as negative fertility realizations.

The qualitative data allow us to examine to what extent variations and cleavages in gender norms and gender-role perceptions are related to fertility intentions. We highlight the role of social differentials in these associations and their changes over time.

Linking quantitative data of GGS2020 and qualitative interviews in 2022 we study how future outlooks affect considerations of having a child and to what extent such imaginations may overrule factual (un)certainties in people’s current life situation.