About the project

Project goal

In this project we analyse contraceptual behavior and contraceptual decisions from a sociological perspective. We argue that contraceptual responsibility – mostly carried out by women – should be understood as a form of unpaid labor, adding to other unpaid responsibilities like housework and childcare predominantly performed by women. Contraceptive behavior is therefore a highly relevant study object for social inequality research. Our project aims at establishing contraceptive responsibility as a dimension of social inequality and at showing how it is related to other dimension of social inequality.

Our subprojects

Our project consists of three subprojects.

Our first subproject “Is the pill outdated? Development and predictors of hormonal contraception in Germany”, or short PillOut, is largely descriptive and aims at (1) comparing the development of hormonal and non-hormonal contraception use of women of across three birth cohorts (1971-73, 1981-83, 1991-93), and (2) analysing the determinants of hormonal and non-hormonal contraception and their change over time.

Our second subproject “ContraScore” is of a methodological nature. Within this project, we develop a formative multidimensional index to measure risks, costs and benefits of contraceptive choices. The resulting measure gives a score that relates the benefits of a contraceptive method to its costs and risks.

In our third subproject “Within-couple power dynamics, and the distribution of fertility work: Evidence from Germany”, or short FertilityWork, we study within-couple power dynamics and their relationship to and the distribution of fertility work within couples.