The Development And Application Of The Value Of Children Evaluation Questionnaire For Youth (VOCQFY)

The value of children (VOC) is a concept focusing on the functions that children can play to satisfy their parents' needs. In order to improve the execution of China's population control policy, the study seeks to solve the following problems: (1) to develop a VOC evaluation questionnaire which is applicable to the China youth; (2) to find out the VOC evaluation characteristics of the youth of different demographical characters;(3) to explore the primary determinants of VOC and the relationships between VOC and fertility intention.It collected questionnaire items by lecture search, interviewing and unstructured questionnaire, the results of EFA and CFA showed that, the VOCQFY consisted of 8 dimensions, namely, psychological-emotional satisfaction, responsibility acquirement and embodiment, economic value, competition approach and prestige acquirement, family relationships expectancy and realization, marital happiness and familial integrity , information acquirement and relationship extending, family inheriting and continuity. The VOCQFY had good reliability and validity which can be applied to measure the VOC evaluation trend of the Chinese youth.The VOC evaluation trend of 660 youth participants were measured by the VOCQFY, the results showed that: (1) except the psychological-emotional satisfaction dimension, the score of male participants were significantly higher than that of female participants on other dimensions of the VOCQFY; (2) to single dimension and the whole questionnaire, there was no significant difference between urban participants and rural participants; (3) except the economic value dimension and the information acquirement and relationship extending dimension, to other dimensions and the whole questionnaire, the score of those who had endowment insurance was significantly higher than those who didn't have; (4) except the economic value dimension , the score of different education level participants were significant different on other dimensions and the whole questionnaire; (5) except economic value, family relationships expectancy and realization, information acquirement and relationship extending, the score of married participants were significantly higher than that of unmarried participants on other dimensions and the whole questionnaire; (6) Urbanization, education level, family income, the number of father's sibling and the number of participant's sibling can effectively predict some dimensions of VOC; (7) VOC significantly differed between different ideal fertility intention patterns and between different planned fertility intention patterns.