Social Capital and Single Child in Employed Women

The rapid decline in the fertility rate has placed Iran among the countries with “below replacement fertility”, which represents a single-child behavior. Social networks (as one of the components of social capital) have been considered in recent years to understand fertility behaviors and changes in the levels of fertility. This study was conducted to investigate the relationship between social capital and single-child behavior in Iranian women workers.

In a cross-sectional study, 600 female workers were recruited by stratified sampling in health care settings in Babol, a city in northern Iran, in 2018. Data collection tools consisted of a questionnaire for demographic characteristics, fertility behavior, and social capital. Data analysis was performed by SPSS-21 software using Poisson regression and logistic regression at a significance level of 0.05.

In this study, 45% of women were single-child and 54.5% did not intend to be pregnant again. There was a significant relationship between the number of pregnancies and social capital (P = 0.039). Similarly, in women with low social capital, the odds of single-child behavior increased although it was not significant (95% CI: 0.899 - 2.220, OR = 1.41).

The results of this study showed that increased social capital was associated with an increase in the number of pregnancies. Attention to social capital should be taken into account in population planning and policy-making.