Who Delays Childbearing? The Associations Between Time to First Birth, Personality Traits and Education

Lara Tavares ()

European Journal of Population, 2016, vol. 32, issue 4, No 4, 575-597

Abstract: Abstract Using data from a large-scale survey, the British Household Panel Survey, this paper assesses the influence of personality traits on the timing of first childbirth and investigates whether, and in what way, personality traits explain the differences in maternity timing across educational groups. We estimate a log-logistic model of the time to first childbirth and show that there is a statistically significant relationship between the Big Five personality traits and the timing of motherhood. The results also show that highly qualified women who are ‘open-minded’ have the lowest hazards of childbirth, lower than similar less educated counterparts.

Keywords: Reproductive behaviour; Fertility determinants; Delayed childbearing; Personality; Big Five; Educational status (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10680-016-9393-1 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:eurpop:v:32:y:2016:i:4:d:10.1007_s10680-016-9393-1

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/10680

DOI: 10.1007/s10680-016-9393-1

Access Statistics for this article

European Journal of Population is currently edited by Helga A.G. de Valk

More articles in European Journal of Population from Springer, European Association for Population Studies
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().