Understanding Narratives of Uncertainty in Fertility Intentions of Dutch Women: A Neural Topic Modeling Approach

Abstract

Uncertainty in fertility intentions is a major obstacle to understanding contemporary trends in fertility decision-making and its outcomes. Quantifying this uncertainty by structural factors such as income, ethnicity, and housing conditions is recognized as insufficient. A recently proposed framework on subjective narratives has opened up a new way to gauge factors behind fertility decision-making and uncertainty. Through surveys, such narratives can be elicited with open-ended questions (OEQs). However, analyzing answers to OEQs typically involves extensive human coding, imposing constraints on sample size. Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques assist researchers in grasping aspects of the underlying reasoning behind responses with much less human effort. In this study, using automatic neural topic modeling methods, we identify and interpret topics and themes underlying the narratives on fertility intention uncertainty of women in the Netherlands. We used Contextualized Topic Models (CTMs), a neural topic model using pre-trained representations of Dutch language, to conduct our analyses. Our results show that nine topics dominate the narratives about fertility planning, with age and health-related issues as the most prominent ones. In addition, we found that uncertainty in fertility intentions is not homogeneous, as women who feel uncertain due to real-life constraints and those who have no fertility plans at all put their stress on vastly different narratives.