The economics of deciding not to have children
For younger adults, family planning has become entangled with housing, unstable career paths, and how they read the future. These are hard to separate with a tick-box.
Why it is hard to measure
- Housing cost, job volatility, and changing views on marriage all press on the same decision at once.
- Ask which factor matters most and you force a ranking that people do not actually hold in their heads.
- The same answer can mean "not yet" or "not ever", and a form cannot tell those apart.
- What researchers want is the reasoning, not the category.
Questions only a conversation can ask
“What would have to be true about your life, two years from now, for having a child to feel possible?”
“Was there a moment your family plans changed? Tell me what was going on around then.”
Where SamSurveyor fits
Fixed options limit people to the categories the author already thought of. A conversational survey lets someone answer in their own words, so "not yet" and "not ever" are different data. Ancillary questions about financial pressures yield recipient narratives with data points about planning decisions.
Hear this discussed
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