A Transnational Comparison of Individual Birth Planning Decisions for Hypothetical Families

Abstract

College students in West Germany, the Netherlands, India, and the United States made birth-planning "decisions" for forty hypothetical family situations. The situations depicted eight familial characteristics which could be descriptive of families in any country where there is monogamous marriage, where it is expected that the husband (father) should be the major provider, and where the wife (mother) should be chiefly responsible for activities involving the home and children. Comparisons of responses revealed large similarities across national samples in thinking about the family in the abstract. Some irregularities in decisions across samples were also evident. It is suggested that a similarity in thinking regarding family structure may underlie the cultural differences found by earlier crossnational family research.