Variation in the intersection between partnership and fertility: A comparison across 3 cohorts in 16 countries

The intersection between partnership forms and fertility is increasingly complicated in the United States and European countries. This is due to increasing variety in partnership forms, diversity in fertility and changes in the way that these two processes interact. For example, in countries such as Norway, non-marital cohabitation, birth postponement and births to stable but non-marital partnerships are important, while in Italy, birth is largely restricted to marital relationships, which are universal albeit postponed. This paper uses Latent Class Growth models to evaluate the relationship between partnership and fertility and how this varies across the United States and 15 European countries. These models optimise a number of typical behaviours, and we examine how these are distributed across both birth cohort and national setting, to evaluate not only variations in behaviour, but also differences in how relationships have changed during the 20th century.