The Effect of Expected Socioeconomic Status on the Willingness to Have another Child among Contemporary Chinese People of Childbearing Age

In the global context, China's shift toward bearing fewer children and a longer life expectancy has brought the willingness to have another child into the spotlight. This study revealed the effect of the expected socioeconomic status on the willingness to have another child and its influencing mechanism among the contemporary Chinese population of childbearing age and further tested the moderating effect of relative deprivation. A binary logistic regression model was constructed using 2982 observations of the reproductive age population, and the relationship between the willingness to have children and expected socioeconomic status was examined. The stepwise regression method and bootstrap method were used to test the mediating effect. The results demonstrate that the expected socioeconomic status was positively related to the reproduction intention of people of childbearing age, the educational burden due to existing children played a partial mediating role between expected socioeconomic status and the reproduction intention of people of childbearing age, and the sense of far deprivation played a negative moderating role between the expected socioeconomic status and the reproduction intention of people of childbearing age. The present study contributes to the existing literature regarding the factors affecting the intention to have another child, which almost always starts with existing conditions, such as family income, and neglects the fact that the expected socioeconomic status of people of childbearing age is also a prospective variable that affects the intention to have another child. These findings imply that the supporting system of fertility policy and the sense of accessibility for people of childbearing age should be improved.