Marriage and union formation, families and households

This paper investigates marriage patterns, particularly the rates of marriage and marital homogamy in Lebanon. The legacy of sixteen years of civil war has resulted in imbalances between males and females and institutionalization of migration particularly among young men. This along with the increased levels of women’s education has affected the marriage market for both men and women. We hypothesize that those with higher levels of education will have lower marriage rates, higher levels of women never-married by age 35, and lower marital homogamy. This study uses data from the Lebanese Family Health Survey 2004 conducted by the Ministry of Social Affairs and the Central Administration of Statistics as part of an agreement with the Pan-Arab Project for Family Health (PAPFAM). It collected data from 5532 households and 3365 ever married women between ages 15-54 with overall response rate of 96.2%.Data on households and persons in household roster are used

Socioeconomic resources and division of breadwinning responsibilities in the early stages of childrearing.

The analysis is based on register data comprising all Norwegian married and cohabiting couples whose first common child was born in the period 1987 – 2001. We analyze the sharing of breadwinning responsibilities at three stages of the family cycle: the year the first common child was born, two years after and six years after. We define the following groups of breadwinning models: I Traditional (mother’s income amounts to 35 percent or less of father’s income), II “Equality light” (mother’s income amounts to between 35 and 80 percent of father’s income), III Equal (mother’s income amounts to between 80 and 120 percent of father’s income) and IV Untraditional (mother’s income amounts to more than 120 percent of father’s income, including couples where father’s income = 0). We investigate to what extent the couples’ distribution on breadwinning models are influenced by socioeconomic resources, defined as couple’s education (combined classification) and father’s income, marital status (married or cohabiting), as well as family changes after the initial year – like additional children born and transition to marriage for cohabitants. We also include several demographic variables as control variables.

African families are undergoing transition from two parent’s family to a one parent family giving rise to the emergence of single mother families, which are associated with negative child outcome. This study intends to examine levels and the factors that are associated with single motherhood in Zimbabwe using the Demographic and Health Surveys of Zimbabwe (2010-2011). A total of 1502 single mothers in Zimbabwe, who have at least one dependent child under the age of 18, will be used as the study population. Statistical analysis will be done at univariate, bivariate and multivariate levels. The main model to be used is logistic regression. The findings revealed that contraceptive use, region, age of respondent, religion, wealth index, and marital status are significantly associated with single motherhood. The study will be extended to other Southern African countries: Lesotho and Swaziland.

This paper questions whether the shift to self-choice marriage implies that the traditional cultural norms stressing family influence on spouse selection have been weakened by inroads of modern norms of greater individual autonomy in the marriage process. Using a representative sample of married young adults (aged 20-34) in Greater Jakarta, we explore the courtship processes, and the degree of parental role in spouse selection. While only 4 per cent of the respondents cited that their marriage was arranged by others; over half of the respondents reported their parents or in-laws played a major role in their marriage decision. Our multivariate analysis suggests that the tertiary educated respondents are those most likely to report their parents playing a major role. We reflect on the prevailing cultural norms to discuss the centrality of family in studying the interactions between marriage, education, and social mobility in modern Indonesia.

In recent years there has been generally an increase in the number of years people continue to be unmarried and, in particular, a rise in girls’ marriage age is being observed. In view of the fact that a rise in marriage age leads to decreasing women ’s fertility and consequently population will be declining and the society will face the phenomenon of population aging in long term, the investigation of single life style and its pros and cons for those who will choose to live it, is of crucial importance. The present study is a research into the lived experiences of single women i.e.those who are over 35 years of old and have not been married. This study adopted the phenomenological approach, and phenomenological method,since by taking ontological tenets into account, it mainly focuses on the first hand or lived experiences and keeps away from secondary issues. Findings were obtained through in-depth phenomenologically-oriented interviews with fifteen never-married women from Tehran city who were selected by purposive snowball-dependent sampling. The results suggest that contrary to other countries research findings, singlehood in Iran have posed problems for never-married women. In fact, women don’t take a positive view toward the phenomenon of singlehood .

The trend in union formation among women has changed in the Philippines in the last decade. Based on the series of national demographic surveys, the percentage of Filipino women in a formal marriage generally declined (53 percent in 1998 to 51 percent in 2008). During the same period, the percentage of women who entered into a cohabiting union almost doubled from six percent to 11 percent. These trends are no different from those found using the census data (see Kabamalan, 2006).

But while such levels of change can be analyzed using cross-sectional data repeatedly, one cannot find out how the marital behaviour for an individual changed over time because there are different people in the sample for the different years. This paper attempts to fill this gap by using pseudo cohorts which enables for the tracking of the average experiences of people born in the same year. Thus, trends over time, trends by age and their interaction can be examined.

Following the procedures described by (Uren, 2006) for the General Household Survey Pseudo Cohort Dataset, the 1998, 2003 and 2008 National Demographic and Health Surveys for the Philippines was transformed into one dataset containing over 41,000 individual records from the birth cohorts of 1948 to 1993.

Gender imbalance in the marriage market is commonly known as marriage squeeze, it can be either for male or female. The present study is based on India, China and Korea only. The reason behind the selection is that these typical countries are facing very much distorted sex ratio at birth due to sex determination test and sex selective abortions which are affecting sex ratio at birth (SRB). Also it is seen that SRB is an important factor affecting the marriage market, thus in this context present study is trying to capture the levels and trends of marriage squeeze for the period 2000-2050, also trying to get the association between SRB and marriage squeeze. Analysis shows that if fertility and mortality condition will remain same in future then these countries will face high male marriage squeeze. Whereas improvement in SRB might be help to balance marriage market up to some extent.

According to Egyptian norms, children stay home till they get married and parents are expected to help financially in costs of their marriages. Hence it is important to study the relation between parent’s social class and their children’s early career social class.
This paper studies inter-generational social mobility from parent’s (root) household to stemmed children’s household with primary focus on wealth mobility as a stable measure of the economic status of households; not affected by fluctuations of income.
The Egyptian Labor Market Survey of 1998 and its panel of 2006 are used. Wealth index for each of the two consequent-generations’ households is constructed using principal components method utilizing information on key characteristics of the housing unit and ownership of assets.
The transition of social mobility is observed in 1998 for the root households and 2006 for the stemmed households using wealth mobility transition matrix. An in-depth analysis is performed to study the relation between the wealth index of stemmed households and their own as well as their parents’ socio-economic characteristics. In order to allow for the relation between parent’s wealth and children’s wealth to differ according to every social level, quantile regression is used at different percentiles of the distribution.

Using data from the National Study of Youth and Religion (NSYR), I investigate how a range of socio-economic and demographic variables are related to a high degree of importance to particular achievements before marriage according to never married young adults (ages 17-24) . I then provide in-depth narrative of premarital life-plans drawing on qualitative data from semi-structured interviews conducted with a subsample of NSYR survey respondents.

During last decade the demographic behavior of Russian population has drastically changed, noticeable changes occurred in timing of marriage and fertility, in preferences of young generations in their living arrangements. The paper gives a view of current transformation in nuptiality and fertility trends and its factors. We reveal new attitudes towards sexual relationships, changes in a family planning model. Young age at marriage was a specific feature of nuptiality pattern in Russia in the early 90s, fertility in the age group 15-19 was comparable with indicator for the 30-34 age group and exceeded that of the 35-39 age groups. By the threshold of the new century, the marriage rate at young ages declined considerably. Approximately 40% of births in the youngest age groups occur out of wedlock. The latter indicates the social significance of this phenomenon and arouses series of problems to be solved by means of social policy. The matrimonial and reproductive behavior of a new generation currently taking place in Russia is a concern of demographers, sociologists, politicians and government institutions. A special attention in the paper is given to the current measures of social policy in the analyzed sphere.