South Korea’s Fertility Puzzle: A Mismatch Between Sustained Childbearing Desires and Declining Fertility
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Although marriage and fertility rates in South Korea have been declining for decades, many perceive having two or more children as the ideal. To understand the mismatch between childbearing desires and realities, this study describes the interrelatedness and incongruity of Korean women’s attitudes toward marriage, childbearing and gender roles by viewing attitudes as a multidimensional construct. Using data from the Korean Longitudinal Survey of Women and Families, latent transition analysis was conducted to identify classes of women with similar attitudinal response patterns and develop a typology of their personal dispositions toward family life. Three attitudinal classes emerged from the analysis: Traditional Familism, Transitional Ambivalence and Contemporary Individualism. The first class includes those with traditional attitudes to family formation and gender roles, while the latter two classes indicate a more positive orientation toward parenthood than marriage. This finding is particularly important in a context where having a child outside of marriage is rare and stigmatized, and suggests that low fertility may be potentially related to divergences in marriage and childbearing attitudes. Overall, these findings emphasize the importance of jointly considering attitudes across various family-related domains to better capture the complex attitudinal dynamics associated with women’s perceptions of family life.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".