Marriage and union formation, families and households

Delayed marriage of women during two decades has been considered in some researches, only as a result of marriage squeeze which still opens to discuss. However, all studies indicated that postponed marriage among women is greater than men. Given the age structure and sex composition of Iran's population and in light of the current research on delayed male marriage in Iran, the paper attempts to address the question that to what extent delayed male marriage affects the tempo of marriage among women. Using the data from censuses 1966 to 2006 and a national sample survey in 2001, the age pattern of marriage by sex and the relationship between age at male and female marriage is investigated. The paper concludes that male tendency to marry with younger women can delay marriage among women, when they postpone their marriage-- even in the absent of marriage squeeze. By comparing age pattern of male and female marriage and using life table method, nuptiality table, it is argued that the extent of delaying marriage among women is affected by delayed marriage among men. In addition, because of the foregoing tendency among those men who delayed their marriage to 30 years old and over, marriage chance among the women, who postponed their marriage to age 30, declines to less than 10 percent (of the total population never married at the age

Present paper is an attempt to understand age pattern of divorced/separated population. Paper also calculated marriage dissolution rates for divorced/separated population, over the past three decades (1971-2001) in India by using census data.
Since last three decades’ continuous increase in numbers of divorced and separated persons have been observed. The increase is faster among the female population. It shows that there is high prevalence of remarriages among the males population as compared to the females. Age specific annual dissolution rates per thousand populations have been calculated. Results reveal that among both the sexes the persons who have experienced marriage dissolution are mostly concentrated in the middle ages, i.e. 15-44 ages. For both the sexes peak of dissolution curve is found in between 20-24 ages, except 1971-81. Among the male and females the highest proportion of marriage dissolution persons found during the 20-24 ages. After attaining the surge in dissolution curve by both the sexes, it shows a declines trend. Dissolution curve of females sharply decline as compared to males. Further analysis will be carried out on the basis of these preliminary findings.

Also in Belgium, higher-order unions are playing an increasingly important part in family life. How social, economical and cultural characteristics are associated with the timing and risk to remarry or recohabit educationally homogamous/heterogamous is however not very well known. Yet, research about educational assortative mating patterns can give us insights into factors of attractiveness on the remarriage market and is relevant for understanding and predicting the reproduction of social inequality. Through analyzing data from 3050 repartnered men and women, we examine if higher order unions are more or less strongly homogamous than first marriages and how the patterns observed among first marriages influence the patterns observed in higher-order unions. First descriptive results show only small differences in educational assortative mating patterns before and after divorce. Competing risks models suggest that there is a kind of continuity over the subsequent unions that divorcing people are forming in their life courses.

In this paper, we examine recent trends in the endorsement of developmental perceptions concerning family and demographic behaviors and assess the extent to which developmental ideas have spread in Iran over time. Data from a two-wave panel study carried out in 2007 and in 2010/2011 are used to examine trends in the endorsement of developmental ideals. Data were collected among a sample of women in the city of Yazd, Iran. In the first round, respondents were selected using a probability sample of 548 married and 155 unmarried women aged 15-59. In the second wave, a total of 510 respondents were successfully re-interviewed along with 43 unmarried women who were selected in a replacement strategy.
Findings indicate that many elements of developmental idealism have been widely disseminated in Yazd, Iran and that the endorsement of the developmental idealism response generally increased over a relatively short period of time. Although, supports to some elements of developmental idealism remained stable or even slightly declined, results indicate that in most cases, there is a trend towards more acceptance and support for developmental idealism in Iran.
Future research is needed to examine the consequences of developmental idealism beliefs on family behaviors.

Much research has shown that the relationship between women’s economic prospects and marriage formation has shifted from negative to positive in the western societies in the last few decades in the Western societies. Theoretical framework used to explain the phenomena in developed countries has gradually shifted from Gary Becker’s gender specialization model to V. K. Oppenheimer’s mate searching theory. Drawing data from the 2006 and 2008 Chinese General Social Survey, we investigate circumstances across cohorts of Chinese men and women born between 1940 and 1979. Our findings show different patterns in China. Educational attainment delays women’s marriage formation, but accelerates men’s entering marriage. However, other economic indicators, including occupation, have negative effects on both men’s and women’s marriage formation. We argue that neither model can explain marriage formation patterns in China without the understanding of the unique Chinese socioeconomic and cultural context, and that contextually relevant theories and hypotheses should be developed.

This paper investigates to what extent parental endogamy can influence the endogamy of a child and how parental race affects the race of a child’s spouse, using data from the Brazilian Social Survey (PESB) for the year 2002. The analysis also considers the type of parental union (exogamy/endogamy) in order to capture possible differences that effect the race characteristics of a child’s spouse as a result of the type of union between the parents. The characteristics of a parental union may influence the choice of a child’s partner through different mechanisms, such as, i) socialization; ii) the individual's marriage market, and iii) direct parental influence regarding partner choice. The results show that, on average, children of racially endogamous couples are about 78.8% more likely to be in an endogamy union themselves than in a racially exogamous marriage. Parental education is also significant. The results by type of parental union show that parental race matters only for exogamous couples, and an individual's own race is more relevant among children of endogamous parents. The results for the analysis of parental race and the race of a child’s spouse show that having nonwhite parents decreases the probability of a child marrying a white spouse. For this specific case, parental education is not statistically significant.

This article focuses on the following question: How would interracial marriage rates change when considering the racial distribution of the local marriage market? I used data from the Brazilian Census for the years 1991 and 2000 and loglinear models. The results show that homogamy-heterogamy rates have traditionally been overestimated, as demonstrated by a change between 15.3 percent to 43.16 percent, when the local racial distribution of spouses is considered. The gap between the percentage differences is smaller in 2000 than in 1991. When analyzing the homogamy-heterogamy rates for each marriage market, one observes that the interaction between a spouse’s race and the marriage market is important, with very few exceptions. In addition, although most mesoregions have homogamy-heterogamy rates equal to the average level, there are some important regional differences, especially in the South, where the levels are higher than the average.

The proposed study will investigate the impacts of higher education expansion in China from 1999 to 2002 on age at first marriage of those who attended colleges and during the expansion period. The college attendance rate of high school graduates it soared to 63.8% in 2000 from 46.1 in 1999 and reached the highest level of 83.5% in 2002. 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.
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 1999-2002 college cohort with its younger and older counterparts, conditional on other factors.

In addition to the demographic components: fertility, mortality and migration, the formation or the dissolution of households are influenced by the marital/union transition and consequently it influences the household composition. Based on the population censuses of 1991 and 2000, we calculated the occurrence/exposure (o/e) rates of marriage/union formation and dissolution for an important city of Brazil. These rates were compared with the respective rates estimated by Zeng, Yang, Wang, and Morgan for the United States of American at the same period. The age-specific rates of Brazil are similar to the rates of United States of American but the American people marry earlier than the Brazilian people. In Brazil, the marital transition rate from the status never-married to the status married has the highest value for the age of 30 while in the United States the highest values refer to the age of 24 for men and the age 22 for women. In Brazil the marital transition rate from the status widowed to the status married has the highest value for the age of 20 while in the United States the highest values refer to the age of 27 for men and the age 22 for women.

This study examines geographical distance between couples in family formation ages and their older parents using Swedish administrative register data. We look at all unions who gave birth to a 1st child between 1980 and 2007 and measure the distance to the four grandparents of the newly born child. We study the geographical distance to the man'€™s and the woman'€™s parents. The focus of the paper is to examine how education and migration interact and differ by gender. In the period of the study tertiary education expanded in a significant way and women moved from being under-represented to being over-represented in higher education. We show how changing patterns of educational patterns by gender has influenced the geography of inter-generational relationships in Sweden. The role of changing educational hypergamy and assortative mating as female educational achievement increased is also examined.