Why have children: a study of method and meaning in value-of-children research

Abstract

The ‘Value of Children’ has been proposed, inter alia, as an important intervening variable in fertility behaviour, and as an explanatory factor in demographic transition. It has been investigated as such by sociologists, psychologists and microeconomists. This thesis is concerned with the notion of ‘value’ which is implied by these investigators. The research addresses three questions: 1. What is ‘Value’? 2. Is the understanding of ‘value’ which a researcher has of the same order as the understanding which a subject has? 3. If not, how might meanings which the subject imputes to ‘value’ of children be understood? Answers to these questions have been sought in several different ways. Firstly, research is seen as a social construction which has its own set of meanings and understandings. This includes prior ideas and modes of analysis: the conceptualisation of ‘value’ is thus understood within the context of sociological, psychological and economic ideas about fertility determination and the nature of social action. The nature of meaning is also explored within a distinctly sociological context whereby imputation of subjects’ meanings is seen to reflect assumptions about objective and subjective meanings, and positivist versus interpretive modes of analysis. Thirdly, the notion of a paradigm is employed to elucidate how subjects, as well as researchers, make sense of their fertility behaviour. These three approaches emphasize that ‘value’ as understood by everyday people does not have the same meaning as that imputed by researchers who have investigated this as an attribute of children. The empirical component of the thesis represents an attempt to apply two different modes of analysis to an elaboration of child ‘value’. Survey data (n=154 pakeha New Zealanders) are compared with material derived from indepth, informal discussions with 15 of the survey participants. Whereas survey data provided some indication of generalities, the conversational analysis was employed to try and gain access to subjects’ understandings of children and having children. These meanings have been deduced by analysis which sought not only the form and content of people’s talk, but which also looked for particular expressions of order, ambivalence and tension, marginality and deviance. Everyday talk was not taken literally, but was taken seriously. The meanings people attributed to children were categorized (by the researcher) as understandings to do with family, immortality and continuity, parenthood, childlessness, economics and biology. Of these, the most pervasive and coherent paradigm whereby subjects understood and gave meaning to children and having children was one labelled a ‘biological paradigm’. This paradigm is not of the same order as that which might be employed by a (‘scientific’) biologist. Rather, it reflects a kind of sense-making which implies an underlying assumption of ‘natural’ order to the course of human events. This exploratory investigation led to a review of the approaches useful to an interpretive analysis of the value of children. A proposal is offered which assumes that meaning is socially constructed in everyday action and interaction with and about children; that talk is a form of action and though metaphorical, reflects the formation, nature and communication of meanings; and that the nature of everyday understanding might be elucidated by examining what is taken for granted and what is questioned, by notions of order and contradictions to that order. By treating meaning as subjective and expressed in parents’ speech of the everyday world, in their common sense, an opportunity is provided to understand more clearly the social meaning which they impute to the idea which previous researchers have labelled the ‘value of children’.