Is Zero Preferred? American Attitudes toward Childlessness in the 1970s

Is a large increase in voluntary childlessness likely to contribute to extremely low fertility rates in the U.S.? To address this issue this paper uses special questions on attitudes toward childlessness commissioned on a Gallup survey of voting-age adults in February 1977. A Likert-type scale of attitudes toward childlessness was constructed and major sociodemographic plus some additional predictors of scale values were studied by means of Multiple Classification Analysis. There is a high level of consensus that nonparenthood is not an advantaged status and although offspring are not regarded as economic investments they are viewed as being socially instrumental -- they are not solely consumption goods. A desire for some children is thus not as vulnerable to cost factors as one might think on the basis of a consumer model of reproductive motivation. Less advantaged groups in the population are more likely than others to regard reproduction as a social investment thus helping to explain the frequently discovered inverse relationship between socioeconomic status (including educational status) and either preferred or actual family size. A major finding is that men are significantly more likely to regard childlessness as disadvantageous than are women.(AUTHOR ABSTRACT)