Is the Combination of the Nationalities of the Couple Affecting Women’s Fertility Intentions? Insights from Italy

Recently, there has been a rising interest on migrants’ fertility intentions (FIs). However, to the best of our knowledge, none of these studies have investigated the role played by the combination of the nationalities of the couple on women’s short-term intentions of having a(nother) child. This article is aimed at contributing to the existing literature on the subject by filling this gap, testing whether and how women’s FIs differ according to the type of couple (native, mixed and migrant couples) while disentangling the influence of the selection and socialization or adaptation hypotheses. Data drawn from two ISTAT surveys were harmonized and merged for multivariate analyses. Results shown that both individual and couples’ characteristics matter in shaping differences in FIs between foreign women partnered to Italian men and foreign women partnered to foreign men. Simultaneously, the FIs gap between foreign women partnered to Italian men and Italian women partnered to Italian men also decreased, giving support to the adaptation theory. Finally, findings point out to the presence of gradients in the explanatory power of the adaptation hypothesis to differences in FIs across groups of migrant women according to their area of nationality.