Why religious Austrians have more children

Why religious Austrians have more children November 4, 2010

On average, the more religious you are, the more kids you’ll have. It’s a widespread phenomenon, seen across pretty much all of the modern world.





Could this be what lies behind reduced fertility among the less religious? To find out, Caroline Berghammer, at the Vienna Institute of Demography, took a look at data from the Austrian Generations and Gender Survey. This included 1250 men and women aged 40-45 – i.e. pretty much at the end of their reproductive career.

For each them, the dates of key life events were recorded – the times when they were cohabiting with a partner, when they were married, when they had each child, and when they divorced.

From these data, Berghammer was able to define each individual’s ‘life trajectory’. You can see some examples in the figure.



Of course, every individual’s life trajectory is different. But certain patterns emerged, and so Berghammer was able to assign each individual to one of several ‘typical’ trajectories.

The most important of these were the ‘modern’ life (a period of cohabitation before marriage ,but children after marriage) and the ‘traditional’ (marriage without previously cohabitation).

Berghammer found that people following the ‘traditional’ lifestyle were more likely to have 3+ children than those following the ‘modern’ lifestyle. What’s more, traditionalist individuals were more likely to be religious (all Catholic in this analysis).

But – and this is the crucial bit – among those who followed a traditional life path, there was no relationship between their depth of religious belief, or their Church attendance, and the number of children they had.




So this explains why religious Austrians have more children. It’s because they are more likely to play traditional roles, in which women value childbearing over independence.

ResearchBlogging.orgBerghammer, C. (2010). Family Life Trajectories and



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