Dr Weronika Kloc-Nowak’s project, funded in the competition for research projects at CESS

15 10 2025

The project of Dr Weronika Kloc-Nowak from the Centre of Migration Research “Reproductive intentions and plans of Ukrainian women and men in Poland in the face of war and global uncertainties” was funded in the competition for research projects at the Centre of Excellence in Social Sciences.

In this project we want to better understand how uncertainty about the future affects women’s and men’s decisions to become parents or to have more children. So far, this problem

has primarily been studied among Western European societies, asking people about their reproductive intentions in the context of the uncertain economic situation (as a result of the financial crisis after 2008), the COVID-19 pandemic and the global climate crisis. Often this research took the form of experiments measuring declared reactions to hypothetical future scenarios. We will instead analyse whether personal optimism and perceptions of various global risks are linked to the reproductive intentions of people from Ukraine who have settled in Poland – primarily as a result of the full-scale invasion of their country by Russia on 24.02.2022.This is an important research group, as Ukrainian women and men are currently directly experiencing a range of risks and uncertainties, including war in their homeland, and economic and social instability in their countries of origin and residence. Independently, as each of us, they may also differ in their attitudes towards global issues related to security, political extremism or the climate crisis.

We will analyse data collected in two waves of a survey (conducted in 2024 and planned for 2025) from Ukrainian persons of reproductive age (adults up to 49 years of age) residing in Poland participating in the online panel of the research programme ‘Between Ukraine and Poland’ carried out within the Centre of Excellence in Social Sciences. By surveying the same group of Ukrainian migrants twice, we will obtain the most reliable data on whether and how, in the context of the ongoing war in Ukraine and their life in exile, their perception of global sources of insecurity is changing and whether it is influencing their parental intentions.

Team: Weronika Kloc-Nowak, PhD, Jeremy Caldeira, MA

The project received funding in the amount of 79 999.86 PLN.