Por que escolhi ter menos filhos? Processos de difusão de fecundidade no Rio Grande do Norte, 1980 a 2010

Abstract

The global phenomenon of falling fertility finds support in the most diverse explanations, such as questions related to economic arguments about trade-offs, about the costs-benefits of having children, the rationality arising from this logic, questions of industrialization, urbanization, female empowerment through increased education and insertion into the job market, access to contraceptives, among other justifications. However, there is a set of explanations considered alternatives and within this set of explanations are diffusion theories. In this thesis work, diffusion is considered the umbrella that covers all other explanations already woven to understand the drop in fertility, as it is understood that the processes of structural and socioeconomic changes that societies go through promote new rules within the contract social, which are learned and internalized through dissemination via mass media and interaction between people. Therefore, the general objective is to analyze the effect of diffusion (via television, radio, telephone, electricity) on the fertility transition in the municipalities of Rio Grande do Norte, from 1980 to 2010. The methodology used consists of a class of models implemented by the R package CARBayesST, which is used to model spatiotemporal data from a set of non- overlapping areal units that are observed over multiple periods. The data used in the model are from the Demographic Censuses of 1980, 1991, 2000 and 2010. More specifically, it is ST.CARanova, and demonstrates a spatio-temporal pattern of an average response with an ANOVA style decomposition within a Bayesian model. The main result found is the significance of the television set in the drop in total fertility rates in the municipalities of Rio Grande do Norte. The result found encouraged a discussion about the relevant role of soap operas in the process of falling fertility in Brazil.