Similarity of Siblings’ Family Formation

Sibling studies have been the method of choice to study the effect of family background - everything siblings share - on socioeconomic and demographic outcomes. Recent research on family formation emphasized that fertility and partnership transitions are embedded in a holistic process of family formation that unfolds over time. The main analytical contribution of this study is to combine the sibling approach with sequence analysis to disentangle the mechanisms that link family background to holistic family formation trajectories. We use Finnish register data from 1987 until 2007 to construct family formation sequences for sibling and non-sibling dyads from age 18 to 30 (N=9581 dyads). The empirical analysis employs sequence analysis, sibling correlations, and regression analysis. Preliminary findings show that siblings’ family formation is indeed more similar than family formation of non-sibling dyads. The intersection of education and gender composition of the sibling dyad appear as important explanatory factors for the similarity of siblings’ family formation.