Marriage and union formation, families and households

Family instability has been linked to increasing proportions of dual-earner couples. These changes have not resulted in equal division of labor at home and create a gap between gender equality in the public and private spheres which is a possible source of family instability. In this paper we ask whether a more active father’s role in the family has a negative effect on divorce risk. We will do this focusing on a family policy reform, namely the father’s quota of the parental leave, which is a unique Nordic feature with a specific aim of challenging the gender roles in the family. Using unique data from population registers we use the reform to estimate the causal effect of more active father’s role on the risk of divorce. The reform was embraced by the fathers and we expect lower divorce risk after the introduction of the reform than before all other equal.

Premarital cohabitation and childbearing in cohabitation have increasingly gained ground across Europe. The aim of this paper is to investigate how contextual factors, e.g. societal values and economic conditions, relate to variation in childbearing in cohabitation, controlling for individual-level characteristics. Analyses are based on harmonized survey data from more than 44 thousands individuals nested in 126 sub-national regions nested in 15 countries. We propose a 3-level hierarchical model predicting the probability to get the first child in cohabitation vs. marriage. Our results show that contextual-level variation is highly relevant for understanding variation in childbearing in cohabitation. They suggest that across countries perceptions on the economic autonomy of women are highly positively associated with childbearing in cohabitation. This lends support to the Second Demographic Transition Framework. On the other hand, we find within countries a positive association between unemployment rates and childbearing in cohabitation, which indicates a pattern of disadvantage.

Children’s outcomes are influenced by the family structures to which they are exposed during childhood, yet we know little about the childhood experience of different family forms. Using demographic surveillance data from three regions of rural Tanzania, this paper explores the living arrangements of children, with a particular emphasis on experiences of parental absence. This paper estimates the childhood risk of parental absence until age 15, and decomposes this risk into parental death and parental migration. The paper presents estimates for proportion of childhood spent residing without the parent. Finally, using Cox’s proportional hazards regression analysis, this paper investigates the child, parental, and household level predictors of parental absence. This paper finds that parental absence due to migration is more common than due to death, and that paternal absence is more common than maternal. Together these estimates provide a detailed picture Tanzanian children’s experience of parental absence.

Life history theory predicts that an unstable early family environment promotes a faster reproductive strategy. We test this prediction using data from the original Kinsey survey collected by the Institute for Sex Research: 1938 - 1963 in the US (n=16207). Broadly, for women our results support the prediction that absence of either natural parent from the childhood home will accelerate reproductive events such as age at first sex, first marriage, and first birth, although the effects are stronger for father absence than for mother absence. For men, the key may be the addition of a stepfather to the household as sexual behaviour was accelerated for men living with a natural mother and stepfather, but not with a natural mother only. For men we also find that mother (but not father) absence is associated with later age at puberty. These results withstand adjustment for socio-economic status, age, ethnicity, age at puberty (where applicable) and family size. These results support the hypothesis that early family environment influences later reproductive strategy. However, the different responses to the presence/absence of different parental figures in the household, and the different responses of the sexes, suggests that parental absence is not simply an indicator of an unstable early environment.

Even in traditional societies where marriage among relatives is wide-spread, fertility is declining. So is the availability of eligible cousins. The custom of cousin marriage has so far persisted in the face of modernization, but cannot persist – at present levels and in present form – in the face of the demographic transition. We show through simulation, with comprehensive sensitivity analyses with respect to model specification, that current and projected fertility levels in Middle Eastern countries create challenging constraints on the custom once today's birth cohorts reach marriageable age. This is true both from the individual and the aggregate perspective. Either consanguinity prevalence will diminish, or the institution will be forced to adapt, at the expense of other social preferences (such as for an older groom wedding a younger bride). Accordingly, fertility decline affects prospects for social change not only through its well-known consequences for mothers, but also through shaping marriage conditions for the next generation.

This paper presents a twofold objective. First, it analyzes interracial marriage rate differences according to religious affiliation. Secondly, it compares the most relevant interracial marriage changes from 1980 to 2010 using loglinear models. The first analysis focuses on results until 2000. They indicate that when spouses or partners have the same religion, the marriage percentage distribution remains practically the same as the total distribution. However, when analyzing marriages between religiously heterogamous partners, all racially homogamous marriages decrease, and all interracial marriages increase. Additionally, all the model association coefficients demonstrate that having the same religion is important not only for interracial marriages but also for all homogamous couples. In Brazil, the strength of religious belief is highly relevant to unions, even for interracial couples. Religion has considerable power over partner choice. Although interracial unions increased between 1980 and 2000, religious heterogamous unions changed at a different pace. In the last decade, changes in the Brazilian religious scenario and racial composition motivated the 2010 analysis.

Sweden, in relation to its population, is one of the world's largest recipients for international adoption, and in Sweden, adoption has become one of several ways to start a family. This study investigates welfare components of the first large group of intercountry adopted persons born in the 1970s and raised in Sweden. Previous research has shown that adopted persons suffer mental health problems to a greater extent than others. Research on adopted persons situation in adulthood has been mainly confined to young adults in their 20s. We will study the welfare of international adopted persons in the ages 32 to 41. This will be done through a descriptive register based study where the population consists of all people born in the 1970s who were adopted from abroad by two Swedish-born parents sometime during their first five years of life. Individuals born in Sweden during the same period with two Swedish-born parents will comprise the comparison group. Our research questions focus on how intercountry adopted persons may differ from the comparison group in terms of family, education and income and our first results indicate that differences do exist.

Households with all adults employed will increase and women continue to reach more prestigious and higher-paying industrial jobs. This paper addresses the relationship between work of dual-earner couples and the way they feel about it given different family situations. We examine the impact of occupational prestige that is assumed to reflect women’s progress in reaching high-level positions, and the divergence or convergence of the partners’ prestige levels supposed to alleviate or cause tensions and, thus, well-being effects. Models will be designed focusing on the smallest available unit, the household, and account for different family situations. We estimate the relationship between partner’s occupational prestige levels and a) the couple satisfaction (i.e. partner satisfaction added up), and b) the relative satisfaction as the difference between the partner satisfaction scores. We expect occupational prestige of couples to increase couple and relative subjective well-being to the extent that it confirms existing gender roles. The higher women’s occupational prestige compared to their husbands the more they are likely to report high levels of satisfaction relative to their partners/husbands. However, we also expect that in couples where a female partner becomes professionally empowered, couple satisfaction will decrease.

Using national survey data and city-year-specific indicators, I examine the effect of demographic and institutional determinants of individual marriage in urban China spanning 60 years. A growth in importance of economic prospect has been observed during the rapid economic development in China. In addition, evidence of cohort changes indicates that the positive effect of working in the state-owned sector on marriage formation decreases, which reflects the marketization in China during recent decades. Capitalizing on the house reform in urban China, I find that the effects of education on marital behavior varied with the levels of house price. Specifically, higher education is associated with larger probability of entering marriage when the house price is relatively high; in contrast, education has a marriage-delaying effect in the cities with relatively low house price. Taken together, these results suggest that the determinants of marriage should be understood by taking the institutional changes into account.

The Palestinian community in the Palestinian territories is a special case of its kind, is characterized by early marriage rates, especially for females (median rate of first marriage is approximately 19 years), in contrast there is a high percentage of never married women for whom aged 35 and over (more than 10% of all women in this age), as characterized by the Palestinians, particularly high proportion of females educated (Holds a bachelor's degree or higher) compared with the developing societies and the high proportion of married relatives, and this study will try to analyze and study the trends and patterns of marriage in the Palestinian territories and the factors influencing the high rates of early marriage and delayed marriage in the Palestinian territories and the factors influencing the high rates of early marriage and delayed for females in the Palestinian territories at the same time , through the data available from censuses and surveys carried out in 1995-2010 in the Palestinian territories.