Paris, 30/31 October 2008
The 1.5 day REPRO Consortium meeting focused on the presentation of the work accomplished in work packages 2 to 6 with intensive debates on substantive issues. Future work schedules were discussed and the involvement of the individual partners was specified.
- Tomáš Sobotka reported about the progress of the work on the Human Fertility Database. Like the Human Mortality Database (http://www.mortality.org), it will provide standardised data, fertility tables and indicators. Access will be granted to all interested users upon registration. At present, information on Austria and the Czech Republic has been collected. By 2010, the database will cover 6-8 countries.
- Olivier Thévenon described the progress of his work on the OECD Family Database. Currently, a limited amount of data can be retrieved from the website: http://www.oecd.org/els/social/family/database. The indicators that will be made available in the next months were presented in detail.
- Romina Fraboni presented her work on the harmonisation of the Generations and Gender Surveys for eight countries (Bulgaria, France, Georgia, Germany, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands and Rumania). The database she prepared contains comparable data for all eight countries and for all GGS variables to be used in REPRO.
- Jane Klobas and Lars Dommermuth had analysed the differences between people who stated that they wanted a child now as compared to those who indicated wanting a child in three years. They found that people who wanted a child now felt they were better able to cope with a child, experienced a stronger urge to have a child and had a stronger sense that having children would be positive for them. Jane Klobas also presented her ideas on how to measure the Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB) in a unified way in all countries.
- Maria Iacovou proposed suggestions for modelling part of the TPB, namely how intentions to have a child act on actual behaviour and which enablers and constraints influence this relationship.
- Clémentine Rossier reported about ongoing work with the qualitative interviews. At present, the focus was on systematically assessing the comparability of the datasets. Before elaborating a country-specific typology, respondents had to be categorised according to their current fertility intentions and the statements, in which they explained their fertility intentions, had to be analysed.
- Eva-Maria Merz and Aart Liefbroer had started to investigate the differences in norms regarding fertility behaviour across Europe and presented their first results on age deadlines and norms about childlessness. Their work is based on the data of the European Social Survey 2006, which includes a module on the organisation of the life course in Europe.