The Joy of Birth? Sentiment Analysis of Childbirth Narratives from Interwar Poland

Bartosz Ogórek , Institute of History, Polish Academy of Sciences

Historical demography often gauges fertility intentions from reproductive outcomes and their distribution over the individuals' lifespan (Timaeus & Moultrie 2008), but little is known about the purposefulness of such behaviour and individuals' attitudes towards its results in the pre-survey era. This paper uses natural language processing methods (mainly sentiment analysis) to scrutinise over 100 narratives, written by women and men from different generations and social classes, describing childbirth in the 1930s. The emotional appeal of each fragment is measured using the Nencki Affective Word List (NAWL – Riegel et al. 2015) and then modelled in tobit regression with robust SE to establish the associations with author characteristics. The study shows that the happiness encapsulated in the description of childbirth is clearly a generational phenomenon, decreasing with each birth order above three. The positive sentiment towards the childbirth expressed in ego-documents varies also by occupation as different social groups place the description of this event in different contexts of everyday life. Surprisingly, the most optimistic and least anxious about childbirth are those who live from hired labour (agricultural workers and labourers). The paper demonstrates a promising method for using medium and large corpora of ego-documents in historical fertility analysis, providing a potential platform for communication between quantitative and qualitative scholars. It also reduces the subjectivity of the researcher interpreting the narratives (etic approach), while retaining a considerable amount of subjectivity inherent in the source itself and its author (emic approach).

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 Presented in Session P1. Fertility, Family, Life Course