Make up your mind time
STARTING FAMILIES IN the 21st century is a complex affair with a strong desire for children competing with other life demands and sources of life satisfaction. This competition, argue researchers from the Fertility Pathways Network, makes childbearing today less of a drive and more of a decisional issue that requires deliberation. People now require increasingly more time before they feel ready to conceive. What people still don’t seem to fully realise
is that a long deliberation period comes at the cost of potentially not achieving parenthood (inadvertent childlessness), says researcher Professor Jacky Boivin. Nor, according to a pilot study on fertility awareness, do young people necessarily behave in ways that will give them the best chance of conceiving – such as not smoking and maintaining the right weight. The need to increase awareness of the importance of preconceptional health for fertility is one of the early messages from the network which aims to improve understanding of how individuals make decisions regarding their reproductive lives and the factors that affect reproductive success.n
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Contact Professor Jacky Boivin, University of Cardiff Email
Boivin@cardiff.ac.uk Telephone 029 208 74007 Website
www.fertilitypathwaysnetwork.co.uk ESRC Grant Number RES-355-25-0038 Understanding Individual Behaviours Network
Nudging citizens into active citizenship
WHAT ARE THE most effective ways of engaging citizens so they do things for the common good? Researchers from an ESRC Ventures project have conducted 12 experimental trials and initiatives to test whether nudging citizens to get involved using some incentive, feedback or cue is effective in giving people the opportunity to think about key social problems and prompt them into action. Researchers carried out a range of research developing innovative experiments over a three-year period in areas such as charitable giving, recycling and volunteering. Researcher Professor Peter John says: “We found that citizens are willing to change their behaviour and do more to help themselves and others if approached in the right way. But government will have to learn to operate differently if the big society is to be encouraged.” For example, in one project researchers tested the impact of canvassing on household recycling. In partnership with EMERGE, a social enterprise which delivers a weekly kerbside recycling service, more than 6,500 households were assigned to either a control or treatment group. The treatment group was visited by canvassers trained to promote and encourage recycling. The canvassing campaign raised participation in kerbside recycling by ten per cent and
8 SOCIETY NOW SPRING 2011
this effect was found to be sustained after three months, albeit at a reduced rate of four per cent. Canvassing was found to be most successful in streets with low initial recycling rates, deprived areas and areas with a high ethnic minority population. Other trials found a six per cent increase in household food recycling as a result of residents getting a ‘smiley face’ feedback on how their street was performing; book donations rising by 22 per cent as a result of people pledging to donate and their names being publicly displayed; and provision of tailored information about organ donation resulted in a 17 per cent increase in registered donors. In contrast, an online experiment in which participants debated youth anti-social behaviour led only to modest shifts in opinions among those who participated. Professor John concludes: “Overall, we show that governments and other agencies should customise the messages they convey to citizens to ensure they nudge them to achieve the best impact.” n
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Contact Professor Peter John, University of Manchester Email
peter.john@
manchester.ac.uk Telephone 0161 275 0791 ESRC Grant Number RES-177-25-0002 An ESRC Venture
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