Category Families and relationships
MARRIAGE FOR THE SAKE OF PARENTS? ADULT CHILDREN’S MARRIAGE FORMATION AND PARENTAL PSYCHOLOGICAL DISTRESS IN CHINA
Dan Chen and Yuying Tong write about their research on the association between children’s delayed marriage and parental psychological distress in China.
Parenting culture and gender equality: the case of Iceland
Despite Iceland’s reputation as one of the most gender equal countries, Sunna Símonardóttir’s research suggests that parenthood is still very much equated with motherhood in the country.
Childcare in Lithuania and Belarus: How Gendered is Parenting in Eastern European Countries?
Aušra Maslauskaitė and Anja Steinbach write about their research in which they analysed parenting and childcare division among Lithuanian and Belarussian families.
Marriage Counterfactuals in Japan: Variation by Gender, Marital Status, and Time
Family demographers have long been interested in the debate surrounding changes in the marriage institution, associated with concepts such as the deinstitutionalization of marriage and the Second Demographic Transition. These perspectives focus on alternatives to traditional heterosexual marriage (what can be termed the external context of marriage), such as lifetime singlehood, same-sex marriage, and non-marital […]
Older people living alone: trends, profiles and challenges of intergenerational integration
This blog post is written by Sarmitė Mikulionienė and Gražina Rapolienė about the outcomes of ageing in Lithuania.
Welcoming Contraception Failure? Towards a Flexible Model of Reproductive Decision-Making
Lea Taragin-Zeller discusses the lived experience of contraceptive choice and childbearing. Today, we have come used to thinking of every child as either “planned” or “unplanned”. Children are either a calculated choice of rational parents or a “mistake” made by irresponsible parents. But, while I was conducting research among Israel’s Orthodox Jews, I realised that […]
Family Living Arrangements and the Transition to Adulthood in Europe
Katrin Schwanitz writes about cross-national variation in transition to adulthood.
Demography and Family: A Microsimulation Strategy to Bridge the Gap
The study of the family has had a long and distinguished history in the demographic research tradition.[1] A central preoccupation of this early work was the development of methods to obtain information about family structures from basic demographic characteristics of populations. As a result of this work, we learned to adapt classic life table methods […]
Commitment in ‘living-apart-together’ (LAT) relationships: less is more?
Roselinde van der Wiel writes about commitment in ‘living-apart-together’ (LAT) relationships and the factors underlying this commitment. In the past decades, new relationship types have arisen that suggest that commitment is of less importance in modern, individualized societies. ‘Living apart together’ (LAT) is one such relationship type. LAT refers to longer-term, monogamous partners who consider […]
Bridging the gender gap at home?
Brett Ory writes about childcare division within families based on the Generations and Gender Survey. International Women’s Day was last month and the take away message this year was much the same as in past years: Women have it better now than ever before, but it’s still not enough. While women in Western countries are […]
Mind the gap: the compass of foregone fertility in Europe
“You can’t always get what you want” sang Mick Jagger in 1969. Four decades and a whole fertility transition later, European women wishing to form a family are well aware of the meaning of these lyrics. Over these four decades, desired family size has not changed much, with a predominant preference for two children, while […]
Women, Church and Cohabitation in medieval Norway
Markéta Ivánková introduces the changing interrelationship between female roles, cohabitation and Church’s expectations to these roles based on fiction and official documents from medieval Norway. Samboerskap, or cohabitation, is often thought of as a peculiarly modern phenomenon, associated with female emancipation and the sexual revolution, but in Norway its roots are to be found in the […]
You May Still End Up Alone: Case Study of Older Adults in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Indonesia
Chia Liu explores the living arrangements of the older population of Cambodia, Vietnam and Indonesia, using the latest Integrated Public Use Microdata Series International (IPUMS-I). Globally, women are more likely to live alone in old age compared to men (United Nations, 2005). This is due to women marrying older men, which is then exacerbated by […]
Marriage Squeeze for Men or Women? Marriage and Socio-Demographic Change in India
The skewed sex ratio at birth in India, the result of sex-selective abortion, has led demographers to anticipate that there will be an excess of men in the future who will be unable to marry. Marriage markets, however, are not only structured by demographic factors such as age and sex, but also by factors […]
Endogeneity vs causality in family research: is it always the chicken-and-egg problem?
This is a post by Evgenia Bystrov based on her article Testing the Second Demographic Transition Theory with Seemingly Unrelated Regression: Marital Postponement and Human Empowerment recently published in the European Sociological Review. The article focuses on the relations between values and marriage behaviour. The writing of this article was triggered by numerous academic debates […]
How to Tackle the Socioeconomic Inequalities of Teenage Pregnancy
This is a post by Heini Väisänen based on her article “Social Inequalities in Teenage Fertility Outcomes: Childbearing and Abortion Trends of Three Birth Cohorts in Finland”. Heini Väisänen is a PhD candidate in demography at the London School of Economics and Political Science. In the media, Finland is often displayed as an example of […]
Conference News: “Comparing families: does international perspective help?”
This overview has been prepared together with Anna Rybińska, one of the organising committee members of the conference “Comparing families: does international perspective help?”. How to compare families across countries? What such comparisons add to country-specific studies? Has using cross-country comparisons brought us closer to understanding family-related behaviours? Aiming to answer these questions, members of […]
Research spotlight: Personal ties or institutional context? Determinants of partner choice for descendants of Turkish migrants in Europe
In their article “Partner choice patterns among the descendants of Turkish immigrants in Europe”, Doreen Huschek, Helga de Valk and Aart Liefbroer examine how the institutional context as well as personal ties, such as family and peers, influence the partner choice of second-generation Turks. Growing shares of European populations are made up of immigrants and […]
Research spotlight: When population composition effects reverse public opinion
Evgenia Bystrov shows in her recently published article “Religion, demography and attitudes toward civil marriage in Israel 1969–2009” how the changing population composition affects total agreement to introduce the institution of civil marriage. Although the civic right to get married is granted in most countries on this planet, in the developed world there is also […]
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