Marriage and union formation, families and households

This study examines gender differences in migration's effect on young adult’s marital timing and spousal choice in Nepal. Unique and detailed monthly and yearly data on the timing and sequence of marriage and migration allows me to separate out premarital migration from marital migration for women, important in addressing contemporaneous nature of migration and marriage in a patrilocal society.
I utilize information on how the young respondents’ spouse were chosen- either solely by themselves, solely by parents, or by a joint decision to make distinction between three types of marital decision-making.
Preliminary results show that although migration delays marriage, young women get married upon return and with joint decision s made about their choice of spouse. In a society where both migration of single woman and late marriage is frowned upon, this result indicates positive changes in gender norms and ideology around women’s marriage and migration in Nepali society.

The recent expansion of higher education in China (1999-2004) was phenomenal. The college attendance rate of high school graduates soared to 63.8% in 1999 from 46.1% in the previous year. The rate continued to experience dramatic growth afterward and remained over 82% during the period of 2002-2004.

Previous studies have so far focused on its impact on educational inequality along social lines, such as family background, gender, ethnicity, and urbanicity, with little attention to other possible important consequences. Most sociological and economic studies take an essentially individual perspective on this issue with inadequate attention to structural factors, such as cohort size.

The proposed study will address the impact of higher education expansion from the end of the 1990s onwards on the marital behavior of those who attended colleges and universities during the expansion period. Specifically, this study will examine both cohort and group variations in age at first marriage in China in light of the higher education expansion. Non-parametric and parametric survival models will be used to compare the 1999-2004 college cohort with its younger and older counterparts, conditional on other factors.

Using data from the China General Social Survey and Japan General Social Survey, this paper examines: (1) differences in gender inequality in labor force participation and earnings between China and Japan; (2) if family characteristics, such as marriage and presence of preschool children and children under 18 years old, have larger negative effects on women’s employment and earnings in Japan than in China; (3) factors accounting for the differences, if any. The results indicate that whereas marital status and spouse’s education and earnings have significant negative effects on women’s labor force participation in Japan, these factors have smaller effects on women’s labor force participation in China. Motherhood earnings penalty is only significant in the non-public sector, not in the public sector in Japan. In China, motherhood earnings penalty is not significant in both the public and the non-public sectors. While married men earn significantly more than single men in Japan and marital status has no significant effect on men’s earnings in China, marriage earnings penalty for women in both countries exists. I discuss the effects of state policies, labor market structures, family system, and individual characteristics on men and women’s labor force participation and earnings from a comparative gender stratification perspective.

This paper assesses the effect of women marital status in the households whether categorized as a head of household or not when her marital status is ‘married’ in her legal marital status. Female household is an indicator of the head of household who is a female when she is a household member. The other factor going to track her significance determination that she is as the household head is the work status of women in the households, into variables 'working' and or 'unemployed'. This working status variable is used as control variable in the analysis. The data source of this research is derived from IPUMS-International Data, mainly focusing on Population Census of Austria data set in series started from 1971 up to 2001 (the latest one). Other literature studies and secondary data are also be used in order to strengthen the research result. Based on the panel data census for three decades it will support and portray the emerging gender bias of trend and tendency in female household in the family. The result of this study will be useful to support the refining concept design and data processing of Population Census in Austria and other countries as lessen learn. Finally, the Population Census data of Austria can be used more strategically and accurately for policy making and decision making on gender sensitive development.

Three decades after the fall of the Khmer Rouge regime (KRR) in January 1979, analysis of contemporary Cambodian society can still hardly be free of references to that period. The following baby-boom induced large variations in cohort size, and the political, economic, and social context in which these cohorts transitioned to adulthood were also vastly different from that of their elders. In this paper, we analyze the transition to adulthood of those aged 12 to 24 years at the time of the 1998 census. Our objective is first to describe some of the key transitions from school to work, from parental to independent household, from single to married, and to parenthood. Within the limitations of cross-sectional data, we also make an attempt to qualify the transition to adulthood along key dimensions and to relate it to the contextual structure. Finally, we use longitudinal that might not be representative at the national level to further study the transitions from parental home to own (or marital) home.

Using the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY79) from 1979 to 2008, this paper examines the extent to which job quality and the unequal distribution of “bad jobs” (i.e., those that offer low wages and do not provide access to health insurance and pension benefits) across different sub-groups are associated with union formation during a time of deteriorating job quality. Results from discrete-time hazard models show that failure to secure a high-quality job delays first marriage among men. Also, job quality partially explains educational differences in first marriage for both men and women, especially those with less education. This study represents one of the first empirical tests of the hypothesis that job quality in the context of labor market uncertainty is a key factor for understanding marriage behaviors. Beyond theory, this study can also inform policy debates surrounding the relationship between marriage and well-being and increasing inequality in the U.S.

Germany, with its differences between east and west, is a special case regarding the diffusion of more diverse, non-traditional family patterns and different underlying motives and social norms. During socialist times until 1989 non-marital childbearing was socially more accepted in the GDR than in the western, capitalist FRG, and non-marital childbearing was more widespread in the GDR than in the FRG. Even today there are still significant and persisting differences, e.g., couples in eastern Germany are less likely to be married than in western Germany when the first child is born, and they are more likely to remain unmarried after family formation. In order to address different social norms about non-traditional family arrangements we use qualitative focus group discussions. We conducted sixteen focus groups with male and female respondents from different social strata in eastern and western Germany in 2012. Each focus group lasted ca. 90 minutes and respondents discussed issues such as the meaning of marriage, stigmatization of non-marital childbirths etc. In this talk I will present results from these focus groups, which will give insights to general social norms about marriage, non-marital childbearing, and cohabitation.

This paper employs Amartya Sen’s capability approach to examine the Ghanaian family formation trajectories from a qualitative point of view. The capability approach, developed in the 1970s and early 1980s, with widespread application in several domains of abstraction, is a broad normative framework for understanding human well-being and development. Based on in-depth field interviews, we explore the norms and preferences, the choices and decision-making processes, timing as well as constraints embedded in the family formation process. The analyses draw attention to the concepts of ‘ambivalence’ and ‘agency’ which are important in smoothening the difficulties actors encounter in pursuing personal family life

This paper examines living arrangements of children in Africa and assesses their implication on schooling. Children experience diverse living arrangements due to a great variety of reasons. AIDS-related adult mortality continues to have a significant influence on children’s living arrangements in Africa, leading to more fostering. However, regardless of parent’s survival status, child fostering remains a deep-rooted practice in Africa. Changing living arrangements of children raise concerns about the long-term investment in education. The reason is welfare and investment of children in education depends on the ability of the caretakers to provide for them. Five percent census data from Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS) is used to establish trends and patterns of children’s living arrangements and identify factors that predict children‘s living arrangements; assess implications of living arrangements on children’s schooling; and identify factors that predict children’s schooling. Children living in households with mothers only are significantly higher than those with fathers only in the household. Survival statuses of parents, age of the child, and to a lesser extent, marital status, are predictors of living arrangements. Type of households, wealth index and age of the child are predictors of children schooling.

Most studies of children’s wellbeing have not dealt effectively with the complexity of multiple disadvantage. Traditional approaches have employed a limited set of predictors and when multiple risk factors have been used they have often been dealt with by treating them as confounders. This present project is, instead, concerned with the experience of multiple disadvantage. Using newly developed multidimensional measures of family adversity, which considers both material and psychosocial adversity, for the Longitudinal Study of Australian Children, we examine the persistence of multiple family adversity overtime and analyse its impact on children’s development outcomes. We focus on families that consistently experience multiple forms of adversity such as jobless families, sole-parent families, and families that live in disadvantaged neighbourhoods and examine their evolution longitudinally such as transitioning from sole-parent to two-parent families, from joblessness to being a ‘working family’, and from living in a disadvantaged neighbourhood to an advantaged neighbourhood. We first determine whether such transitions are accompanied by improvements across other measures of adversity or whether these families remain disadvantaged in other respects. We then examine what effects these transitions have on children’s wellbeing.