The 2021 Family and Fertility Survey: Its New Features and Their Significance

Abstract

The 2021 Family and Fertility Survey is a new name for the National Fertility and Family Health and Welfare Survey that had been conducted by the Korea Institute for Health and Social Affairs every three years. This article introduces the features that have been newly added to the Survey and explains their significance. Considering that marriage and childbirth are no longer universal life events, in the 2021 Survey was intended to the understanding life without marriage and children as well as life within marriage. This article was aimed also at grasping the diversity and flexibility of family forms without presupposing the typical attributes of the family. The 2021 Survey was redirected and its sample was redesigned to match it. The respondents to the previous survey were married women aged 15 to 49, but the 2021 survey takes as its respondents adult men and women aged 19 to 49 and their spouses and single and married people, all integrated into one sample. The survey was reorganized to examine the whole process of family formation from adolescence through the integrated sample, and to observe the implementation of population behaviors such as marriage and childbirth within and outside the system of legal family.