Heather Rackin

Associate Professor

Social Demographer | Fertility, Culture, & Population Change

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About Me

Fertility is personal, but it is not merely individual. I study how culture, identity, emotion, and social conditions shape whether people want children, when they have them, and how many they imagine in their futures. By connecting people’s understandings of parenthood to broader demographic patterns, my research helps explain why fertility is declining across societies and why that decline takes different forms.

My research develops across four connected areas: how fertility preferences are formed and measured; how political, gender, religious, and environmental identities shape reproductive futures; how cultural change contributes to low and ultra-low fertility; and how reproductive and family experiences affect health and well-being across the life course. I investigate these questions using survey experiments, longitudinal and comparative data, and qualitative and media analysis. Across these projects, I examine how personal visions of family life both reflect and contribute to population change and social inequality.

Research

Forming and Measuring Fertility Preferences

How people answer questions about childbearing depends partly on what they think those questions mean and what considerations the questions bring to mind. My research examines how people form and express fertility ideals, desires, and expectations. This work uses survey experiments, historical survey data, and cognitive and cultural theories to investigate nonnumeric ideals, question order, priming, uncertainty, and distinctions among commonly used measures of fertility preferences.

2026. Rackin, Heather, Marshall, Emily, and Behrman, Julia. "Do Survey Respondents Distinguish between Ideal, Desired, and Expected Fertility? An Empirical Test of Survey Design Effects." Population and Development Review 52 (3). https://doi.org/10.1111/padr.70081

2018. Rackin, Heather and Morgan, Philip S. “Prospective Versus Retrospective Measurement of Unwanted Fertility.” Demographic Research. Vol. 39 (3), pp. 61-94.

2016. Rackin, Heather and Bachrach, Christine. “Assessing the Predictive Value of Fertility Expectations through a Social-cognitive Model.” Population Research and Policy Review. Vol. 35(4), pp. 527-551.

2010. Morgan, Philip S., and Rackin, Heather. “The Correspondence of U.S. Fertility Intentions and Behavior.” Population and Development Review. Vol. 36 (1), pp. 91-118.

Identity and Reproductive Futures

Fertility preferences increasingly intersect with identities that organize how people understand themselves and the social world. I study how political orientation, gender identity, religion, environmental beliefs, and gender conflict shape desires for parenthood, childfree lives, and particular family sizes. This research examines the United States and South Korea and considers how social polarization may produce increasingly divergent reproductive futures.

2024. Rackin, Heather, and Gibson-Davis, Christina. “Youth’s Political Identity and Fertility Desires.” Journal of Marriage and Family. Vol. 86 (4). See the preprint here.

2023. Rackin, Heather, Gemmill, Alison, and Hartnett, Caroline Sten. “Environmental Attitudes and Fertility Desires among U.S. Adolescents from 2005-2019." Journal of Marriage and Family. Vol. 85 (2), pp. 631-644. Check it out here.

Low Fertility and Cultural Change

Material constraints matter for fertility, but they don't fully explain why parenthood has become less common, more delayed, or less imaginable for many people. My research investigates how changing family-size norms, expectations of intensive parenthood, perceptions of readiness, and the perceived meaning and value of children contribute to contemporary low fertility. I connect these cultural changes to both widespread convergence toward low fertility and the emergence of ultra-low fertility in parts of East Asia.

2025. Rackin, Heather.“Beyond Numeric Norms: The Rise and Relevance of Nonnumeric General Ideal Family Size.” SocArXiv, 8 Mar.

2025. Check it out here. 2017. Rackin, Heather, and Gibson-Davis, Christina. “Low-income Childless Young Adults’ Marriage and Fertility Frameworks.” Journal of Marriage and Family. Vol. 79 (4), pp. 1096-1110.

Fertility, Health, and Inequality

A related strand of my research examines how reproductive and family experiences shape health and well-being across the life course. This work considers how exposure to death and violence affects fertility timing and how racial and socioeconomic inequalities structure maternal health and later-life well-being.

2022. Rackin, Heather and Gibson-Davis, Christina. “Familial Deaths and First Birth Timing.” Population and Development Review. 48(4): 1027-1059.

2018. Rackin, Heather, and Gibson-Davis, Christina. “Social Class Divergence in Family Transitions: The Importance of Cohabitation.” Journal of Marriage and Family. Vol. 80 (5), pp. 1271-1286.

2014. Gibson-Davis, Christina, and Rackin, Heather. “Marriage or Carriage? Trends in Union Context Birth Type by Education.” Journal of Marriage and Family. Vol. 76 (3), pp. 506-519.

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Current Research Projects

The Cultural Foundations of Low Fertility
Fertility has fallen to historically low levels across wealthy societies, yet material constraints provide only part of the explanation. This project examines how parenthood has become more intensive, individualized, and conditional; how people decide whether they feel ready for children; and how the perceived meaning and value of parenthood have changed. It develops a cultural explanation for both the broad spread of low fertility and the emergence of its most extreme forms.

Beyond Numeric Norms
Prior research suggests that ideal family size has changed remarkably little in the United States. Using General Social Survey data from 1975 through 2024, I show that this apparent stability depends partly on excluding people who do not provide a numerical ideal. Nonnumeric responses have risen sharply as the two-child ideal has weakened, suggesting that fertility norms are changing not only in the number of children people consider ideal but also in whether they endorse a numerical standard at all.

Love versus Logic
Fertility preferences are commonly treated as the products of deliberate planning, but people also draw on emotions, cultural associations, and intuitive understandings of family life. With Emily Marshall and Natalie Nitsche, I use survey experiments to test whether priming changes desired and expected family size, anticipated timing, and certainty about childbearing. The project asks when fertility preferences operate as stable goals and when they respond to how people are prompted to think about parenthood.

Fertility For(k)gone
Prior work described wealthy societies as forking between countries with near-replacement fertility and those with persistently low fertility. With Seunghwan Yoo, I show that this original fertility fork has largely closed as countries have converged at low levels, while a new ultra-low-fertility branch has emerged in South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore. The project investigates whether changes in family-size ideals, gender expectations, religiosity, and the perceived costs and value of children help explain both the broader convergence and the continuing divergence at the lowest levels.