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<p>Current theories of marriage and family formation behavior tend to rely on the
assumption that people can and do consciously plan both fertility and marriage and
post-hoc intentions should align with a priori reasons for action (Fishbein & Azjen
2010). However, research shows this is not always the case and researchers have labeled
inconsistencies between pre- and post- reports of intentions and behavior as retrospective
bias. Researchers such as Bongaarts (1990) have tried to create models that minimize
this "bias".</p><p> The Theory of Conjunctural Action is a new model that can
explain, rather than explain away, this "bias" (Johnson-Hanks et al. 2011; Morgan
and Bachrach 2011). This new theoretical innovation uses insights about the workings
of the mind to gain a greater understanding of how individuals report family formation
decisions and how and why they might change over time. In this theory, individuals
experience conjunctures (or social context which exists in the material world) and
use cognitive schemas (or frames within the mind through which individuals use to
interpret the world around them). These schemas are multiple and the set can change
over time as individuals incorporate new experiences into them. </p><p> In this
dissertation, I explore how and why pre- and post- reports of intentions may be different
using insights from the Theory of Conjunctural Action. In the second chapter, using
data from the NLSY79 and log-linear models, I show that there are considerable inconsistencies
between prospective and retrospective reports of fertility intentions. Specifically,
nearly 6% of births (346 out of 6022) are retrospectively reported as unwanted at
the time of conception by women who prospectively reported they wanted more children
one or two years prior to the birth. Similarly, over 400 births are retrospectively
reported as wanted by women who intended to have no more births one or two years prior
(i.e., in the prior survey wave). The innovation here is to see this inconsistency,
not as an error in reporting, but as different construals of a seemingly similar question.
In other words, women may not be consciously intending births and then enacting these
intentions; rather women may have different schemas (or meanings) of prospective and
retrospective measures of fertility intentions.</p><p> The next chapter uses this
same data to test if women use different schemas to guide their reporting of prospective
and retrospective fertility intentions. Again, using insights from the Theory of Conjunctural
Action, I expect that different schemas (represented by different sets of variables)
predict prospective and retrospective wantedness differentially. I show that retrospective
reports of wantedness are guided more by age, marital status, education, job satisfaction,
and educational enrollment at birth, while prospective wantedness was guided more
by number of children desired and how many children they currently have. I show four
logistic models predicting wanted verses unwanted births. I then compared the model
fit of logistic models predicting prospective wanted verses unwanted births using
the hypothesized prospective and retrospective schema variables and I did the same
for the models of retrospective wantedness. I find that when women report retrospective
wantedness, they are guided more by the hypothesized variables. </p><p> Finally,
in the last empirical paper, because schemas are difficult to measure, I build a methodology,
Network Text Analysis, to measure schemas and to understand the schemas surrounding
marriage and fertility for low-income Blacks who have not yet had children. I use
interview data from the Becoming Parents and Partners Study (BPP), a sample of young,
unmarried, childless adults with low incomes. I use these data to explore schemas
of childbearing and marriage. Contrary to previous findings that low-income parents
do not link marriage and fertility and have different requirements for marriage and
fertility, I find that marriage and childbearing are indeed linked and have similar
requirements for low-income Blacks prior to childbearing. Low income Blacks hold quite
traditional views about the role of marriage and its sequencing vis-à-vis fertility.
I argue that the material constraints to marital childbearing may lead to non-marital
births and thus respondents sever schemas connecting marriage and childbearing and
adopt other schemas of childbearing to provide ad hoc justifications for their behavior.</p>
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