Parenthood intention and anticipated benefits and costs of parenthood for need satisfaction among youths in contemporary China: A three-site mixed-methods investigation

Fertility decline and rising voluntary childlessness have become increasingly salient in contemporary Chinese societies, yet existing psychological accounts often remain limited in explaining how Chinese emerging adults, who age between 18-29 and are actively exploring personal identities, form parenthood intention under rapid social changes, where they need to navigate between tradition, modernity, and post-modernity to make life decisions. This thesis proposes the framework of Anticipated Benefits and Costs of Parenthood for Need Satisfaction (ABCPNS), which conceptualizes the formation of parenthood intention as a process of weighing anticipated advantages/gains and disadvantages/losses of becoming a parent in fulfilling five levels of human needs: physiological, safety, love and belonging, esteem, and self-actualization. Integrating Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, social change theories, and rational choice theory, this research aims to provide an up-to-date framework to examine both anticipated benefits and costs of parenthood, and how the weighing of these anticipations may inform parenthood intention among young adults in contemporary China. Two studies will be conducted. Study 1 will develop and validate the ABCPNS scale through three phases of item generation, examination of content validity, and examination of psychometric properties of reliability, construct validity, criterion-related validity, and incremental validity. Study 2 will adopt a three-site explanatory sequential mixed-method design (a quantitative study followed by a qualitative study to explain quantitative findings) to examine ABCPNS among Chinese emerging adults from Hong Kong, Guangzhou, and rural Guangdong. The quantitative phase will examine how parenthood intention relates to the dynamic of tradition, modernity, and post-modernity, test site and gender differences in ABCPNS, identify latent profiles of ABCPNS, and examine how these profiles are associated with site, gender, and parenthood intention. The qualitative phase will use semi-structured interviews to explain quantitative findings, investigating youths’ personal narratives of parenthood, the sources through which parenthood expectations are formed, and how young adults weigh different anticipated benefits and costs when forming parenthood intention. Findings are expected to provide a psychological framework that could better explain and predict parenthood intention among contemporary Chinese youths, and yield a relatively complete picture to guide researchers and other stakeholders in helping youth make sensible plans for their future family life.