Describing the Dutch Social Networks and Fertility Study and how to process it

Abstract

BACKGROUND The social networks of people play a prominent role in theories on fertility. Investigating how networks shape behaviour is hard, because of the difficulty in measuring (large) networks among representative samples. Therefore, comprehensive studies of the variation in the structure and composition of networks and their impact on fertility outcomes are lacking. OBJECTIVE I aim to, first, describe the Dutch Social Networks and Fertility Study, and, second, describe the R-package FertNet that processes data from this study and transforms it into an easy-to-use format for researchers.