Intercultural and Intracultural Differences in the Value of Children... 129 INTERCULTURAL AND INTRACULTURAL DIFFERENCES IN THE VALUE OF CHILDREN: COMPARISONS BETWEEN FOUR COUNTRIES AND THE URBAN, RURAL, AND FLOATING POPULATIONS IN CHINA

The first cross-national study of the value of children (VOC) took place in the 1970s and aimed to detect the perceived costs and benefits of having children for parents, explain the influence of VOC on fertility behavior and the influence of industrialization/modernization and Eastern vs. Western traditions on VOC and fertility behavior (Arnold et al., 1975; Fawcett, 1972; Hoffman, 1987; Hoffman & Hoffman, 1973). The research project was carried out in nine countries: Germany (the then West Germany), Indonesia, the Republic of Korea, the Philippines, Singapore, Taiwan (China), Turkey, and the United States. It was also replicated in Turkey (Kağitçibaşi, 1982a). Back then, the major concern was overpopulation in the world (e.g., Fischer, 1972; Kağitçibaşi, 1982a), so the basic research question of the VOC study was: “Why do people want children?” The current VOC study, which has been conducted in China, Germany, India, Indonesia, Israel, the Republic of Korea, the Palestinian Authority, South Africa, Turkey, and other countries since 1998, has gone beyond a mere replication of the previous VOC study, extending its exploration into broader theoretical and applied domains of psychology, sociology, and demography (Trommsdorff & Nauck, 2005) in an attempt to explore the interactive processes of change in population development at the societal level and changes in values at the individual level. Today, a major concern in many countries—both wealthy and poverty-stricken—is that people are tending to have fewer and fewer children per family (Leete, 1999). Therefore, one of the basic research questions of the current VOC study is: “Why are people having much fewer children?”