The Role of Climate Change Concerns and Perceptions of the Future in Reproductive Decision-Making in a Pronatalist Context [védés előtt]

Kivonat, rövid leírás

The starting point of my dissertation is the premise that macro-level concerns affect how individuals think about long-term life decisions, including childbearing. Among macro-level uncertainties, my focus is on climate change, which is no longer a distant threat: it is unfolding in real time, shaping the world we live in, yet what this term means to individuals and the ways it is understood and internalised varies widely. In principle, many acknowledge it as a pressing global issue, an existential challenge with already perceivable effects. Most people are familiar with the concept and recognise it as a macro-level threat that calls for concern (European Commission, 2023), however, depth of understanding is not uniform. For some, it is an abstract issue, present in news cycles and political debates but distant from their everyday lives. For others, it is an everyday conversation topic, or even a tangible reality, marked by extreme weather events, environmental degradation, or personal experiences of loss. Those who perceive it as an urgent crisis might translate their concerns into concrete behavioural changes (Broomell et al., 2015; Zaremba et al., 2022). Climate change concerns influence not only actions of individuals (such as reducing consumption or engaging in activism) but also psychological well-being (Clayton, 2020; Zaremba et al., 2022). A growing body of research documents the rise of climate anxiety, a form of distress linked to the anticipation of climate-related disasters, which can, in turn, shape broader life choices and outlooks (Daeninck et al., 2023; Hickman et al., 2021). Climate anxiety has also gained considerable visibility in public discourse, with media reports frequently highlighting that climate-related anxieties might influence fertility intentions. Only recently has academic research started to address how climate change concerns relate to long-term life choices such as childbearing, approaching the issue both from the perspective of individuals who deliberately forego or limit childbearing for ecological reasons (Helm et al., 2021; Krähenbühl, 2022; Schneider-Mayerson, 2021), and from the more widespread concern that climate change poses risks to the future well-being of the next generations (Helm et al., 2021; Ivanova & Balbo, 2024; Krähenbühl, 2022; Nakkerud, 2024). In my dissertation, I focus on the perspectives of individuals and presents three empirical studies exploring the role of climate change and related uncertainties in shaping reproductive attitudes, motivations, intentions and decisions. In addition to addressing different stages of the sequence of reproductive decision-making, I also examine attitudes towards women’s and men’s choice of voluntary childlessness in the Central and Eastern European (CEE) context. Each study in this dissertation approaches a related research question using a different methodological perspective. The first study analyses data from a 2011 international survey to examine the relationship between climate change concern and ideal family size in four CEE countries: Czechia, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia. The second study adopts a qualitative approach, employing semi-structured interviews to explore the reproductive attitudes, intentions and decisions of Hungarian women of reproductive age in the context of climate change, as well as their views on those who choose not to have children for environmental reasons. Finally, the third study, based on a nationally representative Hungarian sample, investigates how concerns about climate change and negative future prospects are associated with attitudes towards voluntary childlessness. The pronatalist context in Hungary, characterised by strong traditional family values and the prevailing social norm that everyone is expected to become a parent (Szalma & Takács, 2018), adds further dimensions to the analyses.