Department of Information Management, School of Management, Shanghai University, Shanghai, 200444, China.
Int J Environ Res Public Health. 2020 May 31;17(11):3905. doi: 10.3390/ijerph17113905.
China's two-child policy, aimed at boosting the country's total fertility rate, has failed to achieve the desired outcomes. Previous studies on low fertility rates mainly used data obtained from demographic censuses, questionnaires, or interviews. These data-gathering methods are costly, entailing time delays and yielding limited information. User-generated content (UGC) provides an alternative data source. We propose a machine-human hybrid approach using UGC obtained from social media to assess users' intentions to have a second child. Our results showed that couples associate a second child with high economic costs mainly through negative impacts on the mothers' careers, with no concomitant economic benefits. A key motivation for having two children relates to the mental benefit of the joy in having children. However, raising a second child also entails considerable mental costs such as exhaustion and pressure. Couples largely seek help within their extended families, that is, their parents are major sources of child-rearing support. Therefore, the government should devise ways of reducing the negative impacts of having a second child on a woman's career and provide child-rearing support to help increase the fertility rate. Our proposed approach can also be used to elicit the reasons for low fertility rates in other countries.
中国的二胎政策旨在提高国家的总和生育率，但未能达到预期效果。之前关于低生育率的研究主要使用了人口普查、问卷或访谈获得的数据。这些数据收集方法成本高昂，需要时间延迟，并且提供的信息有限。用户生成内容（UGC）提供了另一种数据来源。我们提出了一种使用社交媒体上获取的 UGC 的人机混合方法，来评估用户生育二胎的意愿。我们的研究结果表明，夫妻认为生育二胎的经济成本高，主要是因为这会对母亲的职业产生负面影响，而没有相应的经济利益。生育两个孩子的一个主要动机是养育孩子带来的精神上的快乐。然而，养育第二个孩子也需要付出相当大的精神代价，例如疲惫和压力。夫妻主要在大家庭中寻求帮助，即父母是育儿支持的主要来源。因此，政府应该想办法减少生育二胎对女性职业的负面影响，并提供育儿支持，以帮助提高生育率。我们提出的方法还可以用来探究其他国家低生育率的原因。
