LabFam seminar series: Emotion and Fertility in Times of Disaster: Conceptualizing Fertility Responses to the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond
Speaker: Natalie Nitsche, Max Planck Institute of Demograhic Research
Fertility responses to disasters such as pandemics, recessions, or natural disasters have been varied in direction, strength, and across time and place. This background makes predicting fertility change in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, a multi-faceted disaster, challenging.
We propose a novel theoretical framework, which posits that emotion experienced during disasters and emotional change caused by disasters, directly impacts reproductive behaviors and can be utilized to predict disaster-fertility responses. Leaning on evolutionary biology, the affective sciences, and cultural psychology, we develop three competing theoretical models, which we will empirically test using data from the German Panel Analysis of Intimate Relationships and Family Dynamics (pairfam). Analyses will be based on the pairfam ‘corona’ wave collected in May and June 2020.
About the speaker: research interests social demography, sociology of the family, fertility, social stratification, sex and gender, quantitative methods.