Socio-economic factors affecting attitudes towards childbearing: A study of ever married couples in Kermanshah, Iran

Objective (s): 

In recent years decreasing fertility in Iran has become one of the demographic problems which has attracted the attention of policymakers. The purpose of this study was to identify the association between socio-economic factors with childbearing tendency.

This was a cross sectional study. A sub-sample of data from the “2017 Iran Fertility Transition Survey” was used. The sample comprised of 374 ever married men and women aged 15-49 in Kermanshah, Iran. They were selected through the clustered sampling and the data was analyzed via SPSS 22 software using linear regression, Pearson correlation, independent t-test, and one-way analysis of variance

The results obtained from data analysis indicated no significant relationships between residency, housing, home size, employment, education and social class and attitudes toward childbearing (p>0.05). However, significant relationships between sex preference, gender, spouse age, birth interval, Internet consumption, birth space and attitudes toward childbearing was observed (p<0.05). Overall the result indicated that independent variables could explain 23% of variance of dependent variables.

  The findings suggest that the ideal number of children of young couples is affected by their living conditions. So, the success of any potential population polices depends on the improvement of coupleschr('39') living conditions.