Article Review: Does Fertility Behavior Spread Among Friends by Nicolette Balbo and Nicola Barban - Essay Example

Instead of defining the hypotheses at the beginning of the research, the researchers use open coding to develop theoretical insight into the area of the influence of friendship on fertility and develop coded data from abstract connections, visualization, and multivariate thinking. The coded data is then compared under similar categories to come up with theoretical elaboration.3. Research method usedThe study uses the survey research method (Balbo & Barban, 2014).

The survey method involves gathering information from a large group of persons using questionnaires or at times telephone or face-to-face interviews. Since the research is carried out in four phases in this study, a sample of women was collected and restricted to 15 years of age during the first phase of the research. This sample was observed until they were the age of 30. During each phase, the sample was provided with questionnaires that contained open-ended and closed-ended questions inclined toward the influence of friendship on a person’s fertility conduct.

All questions were constructed depending on the phase in which the participants were to retain the validity and reliability of the survey. Since the study involved the population of adolescents in the United States, sampling reduced the cost of testing the entire population, reduced incidents of producing errors with large populations, and was best since testing an entire was impossible.4. Hypotheses under testThe study has two hypotheses but hypothesis 2 was split into 2a and 2b (Balbo & Barban, 2014).

Hypothesis 1: was set to confirm whether or not the childbearing of a friend positively affects an individual’s entry into parenthood or first birth.Hypothesis 2a: intended to confirm whether or not the effect of childbearing by a friend on an individual’s likelihood of becoming a parent was short-term.Hypothesis 2b: set out to confirm whether or not the effect of a friend’s childbearing act on the risk of becoming a parent by an individual is inverse u-shaped. In this case, the risk of an individual’s parenthood elevates when the friend has a child but after getting to the peak, the risk begins to decline.5. Data gathered supported hypotheses results obtained from findings supported that childbearing by a friend has a positive impact on an individual’s risk of becoming a parent.

In addition, the impact of a friend’s childbearing act on an individual was identified to be short-lived and well-defined using the inverse U-shaped graph (Balbo & Barban, 2014). The inverse U-shape reveals that after a friend bears a child, the risk of an individual getting into parenthood increases until it reaches a peak in about 2 years before it begins to decrease. The study also found that a friend’s childbearing does not have any impact on unwanted pregnancies.