The family plan

There is no instrument behind this folder and there does not need to be. The topic list is the one demographic surveys have used for decades — the US National Survey of Family Growth, whose questionnaires are a federal work product, and the openly published Generations and Gender Survey — while every question and every option here was written for this app; the facilitator-gated marriage inventories covering the same ground, PREPARE/ENRICH, FOCCUS and RELATE, are neither reproduced nor paraphrased, and their product pages are named in the avoided list rather than in sources because nothing on this page came from them. Nothing here is scored and nothing here forecasts anything: intended family size is a weak predictor of achieved family size, and people are more likely to miss their number than hit it (Quesnel-Vallée and Morgan 2003), so read this as a position held on a date rather than as a plan that will happen. Take Conversations first to find out whether children have been raised as a subject at all, and Before marrying if a wedding is in view; this is the thirteen decisions downstream of that, and it is what you bring to the conversation rather than what starts it. Every question here is answerable by one person sitting alone, including the three that name a hypothetical other parent; where a block records something undecided the option says «I have not decided», never «we», because a page that cannot be filled in until a second person is in the room is a different product. Before reading a disagreement as a verdict, it is worth knowing that when partners differ over a first child roughly half go on to have one, while disagreement over a later child usually settles as no (Testa and Bolano 2021). One block offers physical punishment as an answer, because people choose it and an option set that omits a real answer collects a false one instead; the largest meta-analysis of the practice found it associated with worse outcomes on thirteen of seventeen measures and better on none (Gershoff and Grogan-Kaylor 2016). That is said here rather than inside the question, because a question that argues collects agreement.

Further reading

• National Center for Health Statistics (2024). National Survey of Family Growth: Questionnaires, Datasets, and Related Documentation (opens in a new tab). Centers for Disease Control and Preventionoriginal source
• Gauthier, A. H., Liefbroer, A., Ajzen, I., et al. (2020). Generations and Gender Survey Baseline Questionnaire 3.0.7 (opens in a new tab). Netherlands Interdisciplinary Demographic Institute [distributor]original source
• Quesnel-Vallée, A., & Morgan, S. P. (2003). Missing the Target? Correspondence of Fertility Intentions and Behavior in the U.S. (opens in a new tab) Population Research and Policy Review, 22(5–6), 497–525critique

Read the result as a structured version of what you said, not as a measurement of you.