Social Mobility and Fertility: Parity Transitions in Sweden

This study explores the relationship between social mobility, both intergenerational and intragenerational, and fertility in Sweden over the last decades. Scholars have developed a rich set of theories and mechanisms through which mobility plausibly influences family size. The original focus was on upward mobility and the relationship was expected to be inverse. After three decades of research in the mid-20^th century, literature that focused on trying to disentangle these mechanisms yielded surprisingly few consistent results, which was argued to be due to unaccounted variation in the institutional settings, theoretical ambiguity as well as significant limitations in the methods and data at the time. This project aims to revive the debate using better equipped data and methods as well as expanding the theoretical discussion to include the important work from the last decades on gender, work and family.

In prior mobility and fertility research, scholars analyzed the total number of children alongside the occupational class of adults and their parents at selected moments in childhood and adulthood. The timing of these measures reflected data availability rather than theoretically relevant moments in the life course, which meant researchers could not observe the order of events. This very important limitation of past research can be avoided in this project because Swedish data provide information on the timing and order of these childbearing and mobility events.

Specifically, the Swedish Level-of-Living survey (LNU) data (2000, 2010) provide the opportunity to study both inter and intragenerational mobility and fertility, which has scarcely been studied in Sweden. This study will be based on the biographies of the 1950-1985 birth cohorts, which means childbearing will be observed roughly from 1970-2010. Both men and women will be analyzed separately.