Cohabitation, Family & Society

Tiziana Nazio

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781134205622
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Demographie

This book deals with the process of the diffusion of cohabitation in Europe and discusses its impact upon fundamental changes in family formation. It makes use of highly dynamic statistical modelling that takes into account both changes occurring along the life course (individuals' biographies) and across birth cohorts of individuals (generational change) in a comparative perspective. It is thus innovative methodologically, but is written in such a way as to be easily readable by those with little knowledge of quantitative methods. The approach proposed is empirically tested on a selection of European countries: the social democratic Sweden, the conservative-corporatist France and West Germany, the former socialist East Germany, and the familistic Italy and Spain. The theory and its application are described in a clear and simple manner, making the arguments and their illustrations accessible to those from a variety of disciplines.

The study shows evidence of the 'contagiousness' of cohabitation, providing new insights on a process relevant to many social science debates. It is thus directed to those interested in the mechanisms driving social and cultural change, the nature of demographic changes, as well as diffusion processes.

1 Introduction

I: Why do you believe people enter into partnership later and marry less?

R: Maybe because now there are not so many problems, I mean . . . the fact that you do not marry is . . . I imagine that before they looked upon you more badly. I do not know if . . . if they had looked at me very badly. No, to tell the truth I do not care, but well . . . maybe if I would have been brought up differently. . . . At home they are . . . my mother at least, used to be more religious, now she has lost a bit her faith but (laughs) . . . Poor woman! But . . . how can you know if . . . I believe that nowadays . . . in former times it was true, ten years ago, . . . you would have moved in together with someone and it was something else than today, today there are many, many couples that go to live together, or maybe. . . . The truth is that I do not know, I do not know. (Inés, 28 years old, cohabiting; my translation from Domingo, 1997, p. 209)

1.1 THE TRANSFORMATION OF PARTNERSHIPS

No longer than 40 years ago, marriage used to mark the start of a first union for most couples in Europe, the overwhelming majority of children were born and reared in marital unions, and a spouse’s death (rather than dissolution) was the far most common reason for the termination of a union (Festy, 1980). Since the late 1960s and early 1970s, however, family living has undergone profound transformations with marriage postponement, rise in cohabitation (particularly since the beginning of the 1980s), lowering fertility, and increasing divorce rates (Kiernan, 2000), which have impacted the prevalence and meaning of marriage (Axinn & Thornton, 2000; Manting, 1996; Cherlin, 1994). Nowadays, in many European countries cohabitation has increasingly become a common way to start a first union. Together with cohabitation, nonmarital childbearing rose to unprecedented levels (Ermisch, 2005; Kiernan, 2001) while lifelong marriage has been progressively postponed and eroded by divorce. All these changes have important implications for the demographic structure of the population as well as for the private and public domains of people’s life. The spectacular rise in cohabiting unions has impacted not only the forms of living arrangements as such, but may also have long-term consequences for individuals. Indeed, though involving a shared living, cohabitation—unlike marriage—is generally characterised by a lower degree of commitment, lower fertility, and a higher risk of disruption (Mills, 2000; Wu, 2000; Praint, 1995). Cohabitation also legally implies fewer entitlements (e.g., tax allowances, some welfare benefits such as transfer of pension rights or the right to occupancy/inheritance of the dwelling upon death of the partner) but also involves fewer responsibilities towards the partner (e.g., maintenance, support, a shared living) and none towards his/her kin. Furthermore, it contributes to the process of marriage postponement because it is in itself an experience that takes time to make, especially when it is not later converted into marriage (Oppenheimer, 1994). Because cohabitation implies the postponement of marital commitment and it is characterised by a lower (nonmarital) fertility, it might indirectly contribute to the lowering of fertility through the postponement of first childbirth and consequent reduction in the time available for parity progression (Wu, 2000). The distinctive characteristics of cohabitation also imply, for example, a profound change in the intergenerational relationships as well as in the transmission of care and familial resources (a still much unexplored domain), and—upon disruption—in the prevalence of ‘reconstituted’ families and of single-headed households. The transformations in the family structure and prevalence of nontraditional living arrangements, which come along with increasing levels of cohabiting unions, are of high substantive interest and policy relevance. This is because of their effect on individuals’ current and later life chances because ‘families’ are still the locus where most of individuals’ well-being is being produced and secured.

The great deal of intra-European diversity in the extent of cohabiting unions is also of high interest. Why has cohabitation risen much slower in southern Europe? How do individuals strategically choose between cohabiting and marrying within different, and changing, contexts? In other words, what is the relation between macro-level context and micro-level individual actions? This book describes and accounts for the dramatic, and uneven, rise in cohabitation across European countries. The idea presented in this book is that people’s choice to adopt cohabitation in their first partnership is (also) influenced by what they perceive other people are doing. In this framework, the investigation of the emergence of cohabitation—its driving mechanisms and differences between countries—should contribute to a better understanding of the dynamics of change in the process of family formation over time. It will shed light on some of the recent modifications in family formation, such as declining marriage rates, later family formation, and subsequent declining fertility rates. This is a relevant issue because the timing and nature of women’s partnership decisions have played a crucial role in the demographic changes that have characterised recent decades. Indeed, forming a partnership is a choice whose effects are likely to spill over to subsequent events in the transition to adulthood (e.g., by affecting the timing of entry into motherhood and/or the spacing between children) but also in relation to the risk of dissolution. But, first of all, how often is cohabitation practised in Europe, and how large are the differences between countries?

1.2 PREMARITAL COHABITATION AS A RECENT PHENOMENON

The growth in premarital cohabitation, as a way to form a new family, can be considered as one of the most dramatic changes in family life over the last 40 years. By cohabitation we mean here a co-residential union of two partners in an intimate relationship¹ without being legally married. Cohabitation, together with out-of-wedlock childbirth, has increasingly become more widespread all over Europe (Ermisch, 2005; Kiernan, 1999, 2002, 2004a). However, this has happened at different speeds and reached different levels in different countries. In the early 1960s, premarital cohabitation was exceptional in most European countries (Blossfeld, 1995) and was rare even in Sweden, a country where cohabitation has old roots (Hoem, 1995; Trost, 1979). Today, cohabitation has not only fundamentally changed its social meaning (Manting, 1996; Rogoff Ramsey, 1996; Seltzer, 2004) but has become commonplace in most European countries, particularly among the younger generation (Ermisch, 2005; Mills, 2000; Kiernan, 2006a). There are, nevertheless, great differences in the extent, significance, and meaning of cohabitation across Europe (Cherlin, 2004; Kiernan, 1999, 2002; Prinz, 1995).

In Southern Europe, cohabitation is still rare and mostly an urban phenomenon, or, in the case of Italy, found in the northern parts of the country (Barbagli, Castiglioni & Dalla Zuanna, 2003; Castiglioni & Dalla Zuanna, 1994, Dalla Zuanna & Righi, 1999; De Sandre, 1997, 2000; Pinelli & De Rose, 1995). In other European countries, three different trends in cohabiting unions can be detected. In some Central European countries like West Germany and the Netherlands, cohabitation has become a kind of a socially accepted, short-term prelude to marriage, and it is typically transformed into marriage when couples have a child (Blossfeld et al., 1999; Blossfeld & Mills, 2001; Jong Gierveld & Liefbroer, 1995; Mills, 2000; Mills & Trovato, 2000). In other countries, such as (the former socialist) East Germany, Austria, France, Great Britain, Finland, or Norway, cohabitation has developed into an accepted alternative to marriage and begins to be connected with a high rate of extramarital births (Huinink, 1995; Leridon & Toulemon, 1995; Toulemon, 1997). In other words, cohabitation experiences tend to last longer and are increasingly the locus where childbirth may take place. And finally, the third trend can be seen in Denmark and Sweden, where cohabitation and marital unions seem to have normatively and legally converged to such a degree that for young couples the choice between marriage and cohabitation seems to be solely a matter of private taste, even when children are involved (Duvander, 2000; Hoem, 1995; Leth-Sorensen & Rohwer, 2001). In these countries cohabiting unions are the far most common partnership form, and a succession of cohabitation experiences may characterise the life course of individuals. Here, furthermore, the highest proportion of cohabiting unions is eventually never converted into legal marriages.

These differences in both the social meaning and extent of cohabitation practice in Europe raise the following questions: What are the reasons behind this uneven rise of cohabiting unions? How can these cross-country differences be explained? How did the current levels come about? Or, to put it more generally, what drives the diffusion of cohabitation? This question has not been convincingly answered yet, although some descriptions and tentative accounts of the phenomena have been given at both macro and individual levels, as we see in the next chapter.

Macro-level explanations of cohabitation as a diffusion process have so far distinguished a series of successive stages in the diffusion of cohabitation, resulting in three to four clusters of countries (Hoem & Hoem, 1988; Kiernan, 1993, 1999; Prinz, 1995; Roussel, 1992; Roussel & Festy, 1978; Trost, 1979). They argue that there is a common pattern of change in which cohabitation is to be observed first in the north and later diffused to the south of Europe². In the first stage, cohabitation emerges as a rare practice by a selected group of forerunners who adopt it for a specific interest and particular reasons, whereas most people marry without first living together. This stage is found in Southern Europe today, or in the Swedish case, could be seen until the end of the 1960s (see Trost, 1978). In the second stage, cohabitation becomes a more widely practised form of living arrangement. Into this cluster fall Austria, Finland, France, Germany, Great Britain, The Netherlands, Norway, and Switzerland. In these countries cohabitation emerged in the 1970s and it tends to be a temporary phase preceding marriage, which can either be associated with a significant or a negligible rate of extramarital births. In the third stage, cohabitation is well established and constitutes an institutionalised form of union. This latter group of countries comprises Denmark and Sweden, where cohabitation emerged in the mid-to late 1960s and is now the far prevalent norm, also with respect to the birth of children:

During the 1960s those couples starting a cohabitation without being married chose to cohabit instead of marrying. . . . From 1972 or1973 or so cohabitation without marriage is the ‘normal’ behaviour and is in no respect at all a deviant phenomenon. Everyone does it and are obedient to the informal social norm knitted to the social institution of cohabitation without marriage. In today’s Sweden and Denmark couples do not choose to cohabit instead of marry. They just cohabit.
(Trost, 1978, p. 186)

These macro analyses provide sound country typologies but are neither the different paces of spread in cohabitation accounted for, nor do they explain much about the mechanisms at play in fostering the diffusion process. Unfortunately, they do not deal with expected convergence or continued divergence between countries and they do not include any micro-level data analysis (Prinz, 1995). Such a macro approach to diffusion offers some good insights but does not specifically address through which mechanisms the diffusion process can exercise pressure by limiting or supporting specific individuals’ choices (Palloni, 2001; Reed, Briere & Casterline, 1999). Existing explanations do not address how the diffusion process can intervene in the definition of behavioural options available to individuals, especially through time, when decisions are taken. Indeed, in previous studies there is an implicit assumption that all partnering options are potentially always available to all individuals to the same degree across time and space. This assumption means both a perfect knowledge about the functioning and consequences of cohabiting (absence of uncertainties) and an absence of constraints, or (moral) resistances as regards its choice. It is an especially improbable assumption at the beginning of the diffusion process when cohabitation is an innovative practice with a high content of uncertainty and is associated with moral stigma; thus, when ongoing practices, attitudes, and behavioural norms are being challenged. For example, it is unlikely that a young French woman considering the option of cohabiting in the late 1960s would face the same degree of uncertainty about the potential costs and consequences of her choice, as a similar age woman taking the same decision 20 or 30 years later. The same would be true for the first woman if she was 10 or 15 years older, thus taking her choice in the late 1970s or mid-1980s. Both personal characteristics and contextual circumstances are subject to change, as is the meaning of cohabitation and its degree of acceptance, along with its becoming a more common and established partnership option (Seltzer, 2004). Following this hypothetical example, another criticism that could be addressed to the macro approaches defining typologies or phases in the diffusion process is their leaving unspecified the reference to a temporal or spatial trend, whereby all countries would be following the same path (although with differing tempo and speeds). In other words, does the Swedish case simply illustrate what will be Spain’s future in the long run?

Building on these critiques, in this study we relax the assumption that societies comprise completely free ‘isolated actors’ by describing and modelling the mechanisms through which social influence may affect individuals’ decision processes. Stemming from social psychology, social influence is the term most commonly used to describe that what others say and do affects much of individuals’ behaviour³. It is within this broad meaning that we intend to make use of the term in this work; with reference to how, when facing uncertainty about decisions on engaging in a certain type of behaviour, others’ models may alter the balance between restraints and desires by raising or lowering either or both. We argue that the more common is cohabiting, the less is the perception of social stigma attached to doing it and the higher the perceived advantage it entails in the eyes of young people⁴. Social influence, which can be generically defined as the tendency to conform to the conduct of other individuals, is the effect on individuals’ conduct played by their perceptions of each others’ values, beliefs, and behaviour (see Aronson, 1999; Cialdini, 1984; Coleman, 1990, Jones, 1984; Kuran, 1995). Accounting for social influence is done here by introducing theoretically informed, nation-specific and time-varying (macro) contextual factors in the study of the adoption of cohabitation at the micro level, as we see in chapters 3 and 5. These contextual factors are used to account for the degree of cohabitation ‘contagiousness’ produced by social influence with the unrolling of the diffusion process.

1.3 GOALS OF THIS STUDY

Explanations given so far to the rise in cohabiting unions have focussed on the influence of individuals’ characteristics on the individual rate of adoption, or on (cross-sectional) aggregate measures in explaining aggregate levels of adoption. However, none has yet taken account of individuals’ embeddedness in a social context, wherein the easiness and meaning of cohabitation change over time and where individuals can be influenced by others’ behaviours. By missing out the contextual characteristics in which individuals’ frame their choices, previous analyses of the rationale of cohabiting unions have failed to investigate and explain whether, why, and how the transformation from low to high levels of premarital cohabitation has taken place (Casterline, 2001). We believe, instead, that individuals’ reciprocal influence, beside the institutional contexts and individuals’ characteristics, is yet another extremely important factor to be added to the analyses of the influences on individuals’ decision to adopt cohabitation. This is the process that we wish to study here.

We will do so by focussing on the individuals’ decision to enter a partnership, and try to explain how others’ previous behaviours can influence their choice to do it by adopting cohabitation rather than marrying. We will take into account both individuals’ specific characteristics (by using individual-level survey data and longitudinal models), the effect of different institutional contexts (by adopting a comparative case study approach), and that of individuals’ reciprocal influence through enacted behaviours and previous examples of the new practice by other individuals in the social system (through our diffusion account). To capture the social and normative change across time, this book studies the diffusion of cohabitation across successive birth cohorts⁵ of young women.

This field of research has only partially been addressed. We already know something from previous studies about the influence of women’s socioeconomic circumstances on the decision to enter cohabitation (Blossfeld, 1995; Kiernan, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2004b; Klijzing & Corijn, 2002; Kravdal, 1999; Wu, 2000; Xie et al., 2001), but paradoxically almost nothing is known about the effect exercised by the social context in which individuals make their choices and that changes over time. This is a surprising fact because of the long and general recognition at a theoretical level of the influence played by the cultural and normative contexts on individuals’ behaviour⁶.

Our aim is thus to explain the diffusion of cohabitation by filling in this gap between micro-level and macro-context of action with respect to young women’s decision to adopt cohabitation instead of marriage. This study endeavours to determine whether a diffusion approach could...