The Influence Of Weibo Use On Female University Students’ Fertility Desire

In recent years,China’s fertility level has been declining,the main reason for which is the decreasing fertility desire of people of childbearing age.Fertility desire is formed after an individual or family evaluates a variety of information and conditions,and the information obtained by an individual has a great impact on the assessment results.As a public space,social media is a place for the public to obtain information and exchange opinions freely.Among them,Weibo,with its core function of instant information release and acquisition,maintains the dominant position of the center of public opinion and becomes an important public opinion field on fertility issues.Although previous studies have explored the relationship between media use and fertility desire,few studies explore the fertility desire of the new generation or from the perspective of gender,and the influence mechanism also need further investigation.Focusing on the specific social media platform-Weibo,and taking the perspective of gender role attitudes,this study combines the research methods of questionnaire survey and in-depth interview to investigate the influence of unmarried and childless female university students’ Weibo use on their fertility desire,while considering the influence of demographic variables.The independent variables of this study are Weibo use intensity,use function,use motivation,and information exposure degree related to fertility and gender.The dependent variable is fertility desire,and the mediating variable is gender role attitudes,which can be divided into traditional and equal gender role attitudes.The analysis draws conclusions as follows: Firstly,the intensity of Weibo use has a significant negative effect on fertility desire;The exposure to specific information has a significant impact on fertility desire.Among them,the exposure to gender issue discussion has a significant negative impact on fertility desire,and the exposure to love or parenting variety shows or film clips has a significant positive impact on fertility desire.However,the Weibo use variables group has limited explanatory power to the variation of fertility desire,which means the direct effect of Weibo use on the fertility desire of unmarried and childless female college students is limited.Secondly,the use of Weibo can promote the generation of equal gender role attitudes.To be specific,Weibo use intensity,information function,entertainment motivation,exposure to discussion of gender issues and information shared by female opinion leaders all have a positive impact on equal gender role attitudes,and reduce fertility desire through the mediating effect of the concept of equal gender roles.On the contrary,the motivation of interpersonal relationship maintenance has a positive effect on the traditional gender role attitudes,and through the mediating effect of the traditional gender role concept,the fertility desire can be improved.However,female college students seldom use Weibo to maintain interpersonal relationship,so the positive influence of interpersonal relationship maintenance motivation on traditional gender role attitudes and fertility desire is not enough to compete with the negative influence of other functions and motivation on both.Therefore,on the whole,the use of Weibo promotes equal gender role attitudes and reduces the fertility desire.Finally,demographic variables have a certain impact on the concept of gender roles and fertility desire,but the impact is small: in terms of the gender role attitudes,the older students and the junior college students are more traditional.In terms of fertility desire,junior college students have higher fertility desire.In addition,this study also summarizes the influence mechanism of Weibo use on unmarried and childless female university students’ fertility desire: The direct effect of Weibo use on reproductive intention is mainly through the amplification mechanism of reproductive risk information.The use of Weibo also has an indirect impact on the reproductive intention through changing gender role attitudes.The influence of the discussion of gender issues in the public sphere,the guidance of opinion leaders and the incidental news exposure during entertainment jointly promote the formation and improvement of the equal gender role attitudes of unmarried and childless female university students.With the equal gender role attitudes,these students realize that they may face work-family conflicts,workplace gender discrimination and "motherhood penalty" in the future,so they tend to choose not to have children or delay childbearing to avoid obstacles to their career development.