Investigating the Reasons for Women Reluctance to Have Children

The present research aimed at identifying the causes of the tendency for low childbearing action or family without a child in women. This is an applied, qualitative-grounded theory method research. The participants of the research were 11 married women who were selected with respect to some criteria and through purposive sampling and theoretical approach. The research tool was a semi-structured in-depth interview carried out through analysis of the content of the interviews by tripartite stages of open, axial, and selective coding. The validity of the data was assessed based on the viewpoint of the participants of the research and the experts from outside the research. The reliability of the research was examined through recoding by the assistant encoder and the reliability coefficient was calculated to be 80%. The findings indicated that from the viewpoint of the participants 10 axial themes affect the tendency to low childbearing action or family without a child in the married women. These themes include economic challenges, the inefficiency of a large family, body management, dual tolerance, destiny, emergency and fear, incurable and unwanted infertility, conditional agreement, their past and the past of the other, and social pressure. Finally, a paradigm model of the tendency to low childbearing action in women was presented.