Abstract

Valeria Solesin, one of the persons killed in the November 13th 2015 attacks in Paris, was trained as a sociologist and demographer. She was completing her doctoral thesis on contemporary fertility behaviours in Italy and France, two neighbouring countries with diverging fertility trends. Valeria focused in particular on the transition from the first to the second child, and on why this appeared to be easier and more common in France than in Italy. To do so, she used a rich combination of quantitative and qualitative methods to better understand the mechanisms and personal motivations driving fertility behaviours. Her initial findings show the complexity of fertility decisions and how these decisions are constrained from a combination of individuals' own and family characteristics, features of the labour market, but also the social and policy contexts. In a tribute to Valeria, her colleagues at the Institut National d'Etudes Démographiques (INED) have assembled her main conclusions in this text.