The Effect Of Cultural Conception On Fertility Behavior

Understanding the effect of traditional fertility culture on behavior will help us to catch on the trends of population changes.Classical sociological theories provide a theoretical basis for this study,while the classical fertility theories provide the study with a reference mechanism for analyzing the pattern of the relationship between fertility culture and behavior.However,limited by the obstacles of cultural conceptualization,existing quantitative analysis on this topic mainly takes the mean value of the country or village as the proxy variable of individual cultural concepts.In addition,existing researches are mainly analyze from the perspective of female individual.It does not take into account the influence of husband and parents.Based on that,this paper will dedicate to explore the cultural value of Chinese families’ fertility behavior from the perspective of family joint decision-making.Based on the data of China Family Panel Studies(CFPS)2014 and 2016,a matched couple data was constructed and the results of OLS model reveal that both the wife and husband’s concept of continuing lineage have a significant predictive effect on the number of family births.Particularly,if the first child was a female,the effect of continuing lineage will be enhanced.However,after controlling the interference of macro-level fertility policy and economy,and using the propensity score matching method to balance the endogenous bias,the effect of the wife’s concept of continuing lineage on the number of family births is no longer significant,but the husband’s remains robust.These results confirm that the concept of continuing lineage contains son preference.Under the patriarchal family structure,the effect of male continuing lineage on family reproductive behavior is still not negligible,although it is weakened by developments of society and economy.Further,taking the stem family as the analysis unit,it is found tha,in addition to the husband,parents’ concept of continuing lineage will also indirectly affect the family’s reproductive behavior through the intermediary effect of their son’s(i.e.the husband in the family).Above results show that fertility culture plays an important role in Chinese family fertility decision-making,Western fertility theory based on economic rationality cannot fully explain family fertility behavior of China.The fertility behavior of Chinese families is the result of the dual role of culture and economy.The conclusion of the study provides a socio-cultural explanation for the change of fertility rates,which has enlightenment for improving the population policy system.