Novelas and the shrinking Brazilian family

Characters from popular television shows are well known to set trends in fashion, hair-styles and catch-phrases; but a new study shows that women in Brazil have also echoed the lifestyles of their heroines from the small screen when it comes to planning their families.

Brazil's novelas - high-budget soap operas aired nightly - have attracted some of the county's best writers. During the years of the Figueiredo dictatorship, from 1978 to 1985, television was deliberately cultivated by the government as a means of promoting national unity and identity. But the novelas have also often portrayed issues and values that were still taboo in other areas of public life, including female emancipation.

Education levels remain low - 39% of Brazil's adult population have had four years schooling or fewer - but the novelas are a mass phenomenon. Television ownership shot up from 8% of households in 1970 to 81% in 1991 - and the novelas can expect to pull in 60 to 80 million viewers for each episode.

Over the past 40 years, Brazil has experienced an extraordinary decrease in fertility rates, comparable only to China where a deliberate 'one child policy' was imposed by the state. The average Brazilian woman had 6.3 children in 1960; but that had dropped to 2.3 by 2000.

CEPR Researcher Eliana La Ferrara, Alberto Chong and Suzanne Dureya use census evidence to investigate whether the spread of the novelas - which tend to feature small, wealthy middle-class families, and many of whose female characters have no children at all - has had any influence on the fertility decisions of Brazilian women.

The main television network in Brazil, which had a virtual monopoly until the 1990s and is responsible for most of the novelas, is Rede Globo. The authors are able to use information about the location and reach of transmitters for the station to test whether the availability of novelas in a particular area tends to affect fertility rates.

Looking simply at aggregate data for 3,659 municipal areas in Brazil, and comparing those with and without a signal over time, they find that in general, the availability of Rede Globo did tend to decrease fertility. The effect was not huge, but as important, for example, as the availability of an extra doctor or nurse per 1,000 people in affecting the average number of live births for each woman.

Next, La Ferrara and her co-authors compare the experiences of individual women. Taking a 5% sample from the census, they carry out a regression analysis, controlling for a number of factors including whether a woman is married, and her level of education.

They find that the probability of a woman giving birth in a particular year is reduced by 0.6 percentage points if Rede Globo's novelas are available in her local area. This effect is as large as the impact of two years' extra education on a woman's fertility.

The impact is larger among older women, suggesting, the authors argue, that they are using 'stopping', rather than, for example, the birth control pill, to limit the size of their families. It seems that the compelling stories of the novelas expose Brazilian women to the possibility of a different kind of life, one which they then seek to emulate at home. The authors find that 62% of the main female characters portrayed in the soap operas have no children at all - and the average number of children is fewer than one.

As further corroboration that it is the novelas specifically, with their popular representations of Brazilian life, rather than television more generally which are influencing women's decisions, the authors carry out two more tests.

First, they look at the tendency of parents to name their children after the main characters in the soap operas. Within reach of a Rede Globo signal, there is a 33% chance that at least one of the unusual names from the novelas will be among the top 20 most popular children's names. Outside Rede Globo's reach, the chance is just 8%.

Finally, La Ferrara and her colleagues test the impact of a rival TV station - Sistema Brasileiro de Televisao, or SBT - which has existed since 1980. Unlike Rede Globo, SBT imports its soap operas from the US and Mexico, and the authors find no connection between the availability of these shows and fertility rates. This, they suggest, may be because the families and characters portrayed in such soap operas are too far removed from ordinary Brazilian life for families to think of emulating them.

Soap operas are rarely thought of as cultural phenomena worthy of research; but the results of this study suggest that where formal education is still limited, television can have an extraordinarily important effect in disseminating information about alternative values and lifestyles; which can in turn play a key role in the process of economic development, spreading much more than fashions or catch-phrases.

DP 6785 - Soap Operas and Fertility: Evidence from Brazil

Eliana La Ferrara, Alberto Chong and Suzanne Dureya