Fertility Intentions of Women involved in Mixed, Native and Migrant Couples in Italy

Thaís García Pereiro, Università degli Studi di Bari
Roberta Pace, Università di Bari Aldo Moro
Anna Paterno , Università degli Studi di Bari

Despite the rising interest on migrants’ fertility intentions (FIs), none of these studies investigated the role played by the combination of the nationalities within the couple. This article fills this gap, testing whether and how women’s fertility intentions differ according to the type of couple (native, mixed and migrant) while disentangling the influence of the selection and socialization or adaptation hypotheses. Data drawn from two ISTAT surveys were harmonized and merged for multivariate analyses. Results shown that positive and certain FIs decrease after controlling for compositional differences: foreign women partnered to Italian men seem to be selected if compared to foreign women partnered to foreign men. Simultaneously, the FIs gap between foreign women partnered to Italian men and Italian women partnered to Italian men also decreased, supporting adaptation. Findings identified gradients in the explanatory power of the adaptation hypothesis across groups of migrant women according to their area of nationality. Keywords: Fertility intentions; type of couple; migrants; selection; adaptation; Italy.

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 Presented in Session 60. Fertility and Migration