Laboratory
BIOSFER
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Detailed Description
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High-income countries are experiencing both unprecedentedly low fertility and increasingly polarized fertility patterns, alongside growing social gradients in childbearing. Key theories on fertility patterns are grounded in the empirical observation that, until recently, fertility remained relatively high in gender-egalitarian countries with strong support for families. Since 2010, many of the countries that provided evidence for such theories have reached record-low fertility levels. This challenges the scientific paradigm of the key drivers of fertility.
The BIOSFER project seeks to untangle the biological and social causes of low fertility in modern societies. Specifically, it examines how social, biological, and psychological factors interact to produce the observed patterns and levels of and variation in fertility among young adults. We leverage ideas from several disciplines, and propose complementing the existing theories with concepts such as risk aversion and decision-making under conditions of imperfect information, intergenerational transmission of fecundity, and epigenetics in order to improve our understanding of modern fertility outcomes. We develop theoretically informed, falsifiable hypotheses that we test against the two richest population-based longitudinal pregnancy and pubertal cohorts in the world, MoBa in Norway and the DNBC in Denmark. We also collect new datasets capturing attitudes and biomarkers from these cohorts.
We offer a uniquely integrative life course-based approach that is neither purely social nor biomedical, but instead combines central ideas from both, and evaluates the biosocial determinants of the key transition points from fetal life through puberty and partnering to planned, unplanned, partnered, and unpartnered childbearing. We study the social, biomedical, and psychological forces, their interactions, and the intergenerational forces as they operate throughout the life course to produce the modern low-fertility landscape. The results will contribute to the development of a novel biosocial framework for understanding the life course processes that drive contemporary fertility patterns.