Childless or Childfree? Paths to Voluntary Childlessness in Italy

This article investigates childlessness in Italy. Trends in childlessness are presented and compared with trends elsewhere in Europe. Different paths to childlessness are outlined, using data from a survey carried out among childless women aged 40‐44 in five Italian cities in 2002. Individual characteristics of the childless and reasons for childlessness are investigated. As many as one‐third of the interviewees who live with a partner and do not suffer from any physical impediment are voluntarily childless. These women, in contrast to mothers, appear to be less religious and to have partners who are less religious; they tend to come from smaller families; to have been in a nonmarital cohabitation at least once in life; to have entered their first union later; and to have had, in the initial period of their union, temporary work and flexible work schedules and limited leisure time. In other cases, childlessness is the unintended outcome of a decision to delay having a child or the result of adverse external circumstances, particularly dissolution of partnership.     

Gender composition of friendship networks and age at first intercourse: a life-course data analysis

We investigate the impact of some characteristics of friendship networks on the timing of the first sexual intercourse. We assume that the gender-segregated composition of such networks explains part of the particularly late age at first intercourse in Italy. We use new data from a survey on sexual behavior and reproductive health of Italian first and second-year university students. The survey has been carried out in 15 different universities in 2000-2001 and it includes retrospective data on age at first intercourse, as well as retrospectively-collected time-varying measures for the gender composition of the friendship network at different ages, for almost 5,000 cases. After having described the data as transition frequencies, we use a Cox proportional hazards model with time-varying covariates. Results are in accordance with the hypothesis that having friendship networks that include more members of the other gender and talking about sex with friends increases the relative risk of first sexual intercourse.