Poster Session on Marriage and union formation, families and households (2)

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.

This paper uses data from the first wave of the New Immigrant Survey to analyze assortative marriage among immigrants recently admitted to legal permanent residence (LPR) in the U.S. We selected currently married respondents and estimated the probabilities that they will be married to spouses who have the same or higher levels of education. We distinguish between marriages that happened before and after arrival in the U.S. and marriages to U.S.-born spouses. Our models control characteristics like education, age at marriage, number of marriages, skin color, region of origin, religion, and basis for obtaining LPR. Preliminary results show that education has a strong positive effect on educational homogamy. We find that the likelihood of educational homogamy for women and men differs significantly by region of origin, religion, type of green card sponsorship, having married before migration, and being married to a U.S. Citizen.

I have proposed a marital fertility measure, ETFR or ever-married total fertility, defined by TFR／TFMR，where TFR is the total fertility rate, and TFMR the total first marriage rate（Hirosima and Bando,1991; Ohtani,1993). Using this measure, the decomposition of the increase in the TFRs from 2005(1.26) to 2010 (1.39) shows that 90.9 percent of the increase is accounted for by the increase in the first marriage rate and only 9.1 percent by that in marital fertility.
The upturn of the first marriage rate by age occurred not only at 30's but also at the latter half of 20's of women, which suggests not only the recuperation but also a change in marriage market, considering the everlasting deteriorating economic situation.
The increase in the first marriage rate is more remarkable in large metropolitan areas and in south west Japan where the traditional gender role model prevails less. The regional aspect of marriage rate increase provides another evidence of the marriage market change.
The economic situation has been breaking the conventional male breadwinner model, and women earning higher income are getting favorable situation rather than unfavorable one. This can be one of the main causes of marriage hence fertility increase in Japan.

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

This study approaches the evolution of the number of births outside of marriage in Brazil over the course of the last decade and the legal debate resulting from such a disassociation between reproduction and marriage from the perspective of children’s rights. According to data from the Live Birth Information System (SINASC), births from consensual unions and single mothers together increased from 56.16% in 2000 to 65.78% in 2009. Some estimates suggest that between a quarter and a fifth of children born outside marriage end up not being legally recognized by their biological fathers, and are solely registered by their mothers. In 2010 the National Justice Council launched the Pai Presente [“Present Fathers”] project to reduce the number of people with undetermined paternity in Brazil. Our goal is to discuss this reality in light of perceptions on family, children’s rights and the gender relations at the heart of “Present Fathers”.

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.

This paper examines fertility and earnings development of recent immigrants in Sweden as a response to Swedish family policy changes. The child-care reform of 2002 is studied. Differences in earnings and fertility behavior between immigrant families and “native” homogenous families are estimated to study the hypothesis that increased accessibility to child-care might be particularly beneficial to the immigrant groups. Data for the period 1997-2009 are employed in the study.
The results of the empirical study argue the presence of a certain life pattern among “native” families having unemployment experience. It seems that this group gains more from combination of childbearing, getting child allowances and unemployment insurance. Nevertheless, all groups increased family labor supply after the reform 2002. There is a slight difference in male and female labor supply between the groups of immigrants, but this is unlikely related to the Swedish family policy and more likely corresponds to ethnic traditions and male and female roles in family.

Despite much debate about what kind of physical custody arrangements is in the “best interest of children”, there are still rather few studies examining the dynamics of these arrangements in the years following parental separation. Researchers who do work on the issue of post-separation parenting arrangements' duration usually use divorce court-order samples that are not representative of the general population of separating couples. Moreover, their conclusions often contradict one another; some find that dual residence arrangements are very unstable while some actually find much stability. We argue that these divergences are partly the result of an improper account of the effect of time on living arrangements' stability. We use population-based longitudinal survey data representative of the cohort of children born in the Canadian province of Quebec in 1997-1998. We use continuous-time event-history analysis to identify patterns in the timing of transition from one type of parenting arrangement to another. Cox regression models allow us to measure the association of various characteristics of parents and children with this transition process.

Whilst stepfather presence has consistently been associated with detrimental effects on child development, studies rarely explore whether these effects are related to confounding changes in the investments children receive. Using ALSPAC, we explore stepfather effects on children’s height, educational achievement and behavioural difficulties at age 7 whilst controlling for measures of direct investments. We fail to find any stepfather effects on height. However, stepfather presence is associated with a reduction in children’s educational achievement and an increase in children’s behavioural difficulties. For educational achievement, this negative effect of stepfather presence is reduced to non-significant levels when mother and partner’s investment levels are accounted for. For behavioural difficulties, this negative effect is also reduced though significance is retained. Furthermore, specifically for behavioural difficulties, we find that investment from stepfathers do not have any beneficial effects. Our results suggest that, for educational achievement, stepfather effects are due to lower levels of investment levels children receive. For behavioural difficulty, stepfather effects are due to multiple factors whereby presence itself is detrimental, investment levels are reduced, and investment from stepfathers are ineffective.

The changes in religious composition in Austria since 1970 have important consequences on intergroup relationships and family formation. Using data from the 1971, 1981, 1991 and 2001 Population Censuses, this paper investigates trends and determinants of religious intermarriage in Austria. The major questions are: 1) whether religious homogamy has declined over time given the secularizing trend and how this temporal process differs by gender, religious denomination, and geographical region; 2) whether religious homogamy intersects with assortative mating along other dimensions e.g. education and migration status; and 3) what individual and contextual factors explain religious intermarriage. Overall, we find that between 1971-2001, religious intermarriage has been increasing in Austria, especially among Roman Catholics and Protestants, women, and people residing in Vienna. Moreover, we find no evidence that religious homogamy can be explained by assortative mating along other dimensions i.e. couples with the same level of education or migration status do not necessarily have higher rates of religious homogamy. Finally, individuals in younger birth cohorts, with higher educational attainment, living in a residential area, with high composition of out-group religious members have higher propensity to be in interreligious marriage.