Qualitative research on attitudes to family planning

Tender description

The Scottish Government (SG), on behalf of the Scottish Ministers wishes to commission qualitative research on attitudes to family planning. The procurement is conducted by the Directorate for External Affairs of the Scottish Government. The requirement sits within the Scottish Government’s Population Strategy: A Scotland for the Future: the Opportunities and Challenges of Scotland’s Changing Population. The Strategy, which was published in March 2021 by the Scottish Government’s Ministerial Population Taskforce, framed Scotland’s demographic trends, their future implications, and 36 actions to be delivered across portfolios. In October 2021, the Scottish Government’s Ministerial Population Taskforce agreed a work priority to create a mixed-methods analytical package to explore falling birth rates and public attitudes to family planning in Scotland. As part of this package, the overarching aim of this qualitative research is to gain an in-depth understanding of views on having children, childlessness, attitudes to ideal family size, and barriers and enablers to achieving ideal family size. With the above taken into account, the specific research objectives of this study are to: - Investigate general attitudes around having children in Scotland and their drivers. - Explore views on the barriers that people may face when planning to have children - Explore enablers at the country-, societal- and family-level to enable people to reach their ideal family size - Explore participants’ views on their ideal family size, and how this relates to the size of family that they either expect to have or already have - Explore how attitudes towards recent trends – such as climate change, delayed parenthood, Covid-19 - relate to decisions to have children - Explore attitudes to and reasons for childlessness.