Fertility Patterns and Family Forms in St Petersburg

Consortium: Reproductive health and fertility patterns in Russia - discovering determinants through comparative research (Hemminki / Rotkirch)

Abstract
This multidisciplinary project analyses, explains and predicts fertility patterns and family forms in St Petersburg compared to Estonia and Finland. The next five years will show to what extent Russian women have changed their life course towards postponed maternity or whether there will be record numbers of childless women. St Petersburg is especially interesting, as it may align itself with other fertility patterns than Russia as a whole. We explore the dramatically changing birth rates in St Petersburg from the perspectives of demography and family sociology. Our central research question is: How are the timing and number of children, parental intentions and cultural rhetoric related to different types of families and to social class?

Fertility patterns and family forms are linked with a country's gender system as a whole. In today's Europe, gender equality today tends to promote fertility. With the aid of surveys and register data, we analyse how St Petersburg fits in with regards to European, Baltic and Russian fertility patterns, and how the dramatic fluctuations in post-Soviet Russia can be theoretically explained. By using qualitative data (life history interviews and text analysis), we make case studies of how fertility patterns are related to questions of family forms and kinship structures and to the informal and formal organisation of child care. We also analyse the public responses to the decline in fertility and their relationships to nationalist and gender ideology.

Specifically, we study the following themes through five subprojects:

1. Validity of official Russian registers concerning demographic trends and fertility.
2. Fertility levels and trends in St Petersburg: changes in childbearing with respect to the timing of births, completed cohort fertility, and social class.
3. Intentions of younger women and couples to have (additional) children; factors and constraints affecting their decision-making.
4. Patterns of childbearing and parenting with regards to social class, family formation and type of household (gendered division of work, intergenerational care, child care services). 
5.  Public responses to declined fertility (political discourses on nativity and the nation).

Project leader: Anna Rotkirch, VTT, University of Helsinki / Collegium for Advenced Studies, POB 4, 00014 University of Helsinki, tel. + 358 (0)9 191 23438, anna.rotkirch(at)helsinki.fi, www.valt.helsinki.fi/staff/rotkirch/

Project home page:  http://www.valt.helsinki.fi/staff/rotkirch/RH_&_fertility_patterns

Researchers
Mika Gissler, STAKES, mika.gissler(at)stakes.fi
Katja Kesseli, University of Helsinki, katja.kesseli(at)helsinki.fi
Pekka Martikainen, University of Helsinki, pekka.martikainen(at)helsinki.fi
Kari Pitkänen, University of Helsinki, kari.pitkänen(at)helsinki.fi

Project description