Graduate student Andrea Mazzarino, supervised by Dr. Kay Warren and Dr. David Kertzer, will undertake research on the relation between the economy and reproductive decision making by professional women. The research will be carried in St. Petersburg, Russia. Russia is a good site for this study because of the extensive economic changes there in recent years. Public services have been reduced, living standards have declined, and market engagement has increased. These changes have been accompanied by declining birth rates, and there has been a resurgence of political discourses and policies encouraging women to bear more children and raise them in nuclear families. At the same time, an increasing number of Russian women are taking important roles in the new economy, such as management and technology jobs in businesses. Work has enabled new life paths for these women that do not involve the traditional roles of marriage and motherhood. Thus Russian women provide an excellent case study for linked demographic and economic patterns that are likely to be found in many other contexts, as well.
The researcher will use a mixed methods approach to understanding the factors behind Russia's low and declining fertility rate. She will employ participant observation in home, health care, and work settings. Focusing on an age-stratified sample of professional women, she will conduct in-depth interviews and collect life history case studies. She also will explore how women negotiate the competing pressures in their lives as citizens, wives, and professionals, and the consequences of such pressures for women's reproductive health and outcomes. Specifically, she will look at the forces that lead some women to find themselves unsuccessful in their work positions; unable to meet their relationship and reproductive goals; or with poor reproductive health outcomes such as trauma or medical complications associated with pregnancy.
The research is important because it will contribute to a better theoretical understanding of the relationship between economic change and fertility rates, a question of significance world wide. More broadly, the research will contribute to social science that seeks to understand how transnational movements of people, capital, and information affect local people's lives. The research also will contribute to the education of a social scientist.
