Relationship between personality traits and childbearing in an African context: Evidence from Ghana

This paper provides empirical evidence on the association between personality and childbearing in an African context using the dimensions of the Big Five factor model - extraversion, conscientiousness, neuroticism, openness to experience and agreeableness. Applying the negative binomial and zero-inflated negative binomial regression models to data obtained from the World Bank's survey on Skills toward Employment and Productivity (STEP) for Ghana, we found that after controlling for age, education, spouse and employment status, three of the personality traits, namely conscientiousness, openness to experience and agreeableness, have significant associations with number of children. Openness to experience is negatively associated with number of children in both males and females. However, conscientiousness and agreeableness are negatively and positively associated with number of children respectively but only in the male sample. Extraversion and stability were not significantly associated with number of children even when the models were estimated without the control variables.