对同居现象的探讨

文章首先对同居现象作了界定,分析了国内外同居现象的现状,并对同居现象产生和盛行的原因作了深入探讨,文章最后对同居是否会替代婚姻作了进一步的分析。     

Shifting family definitions: The effect of cohabitation and other nonfamily household relationships on measures of poverty

The current official poverty measure compares income to needs within a family. Some have suggested including cohabiting couples as part of this family. Others have suggested that the household be used as the unit of analysis for poverty measurement. I explore issues involved in expanding the unit of analysis, including the stability of cohabiting and other nonfamily household relationships and the degree of resource sharing that takes place among different types of people within households. Instability in households with nonfamily members is not a serious problem for inferring poverty from cross-sectional studies. On the other hand, income from people in nonfamily household roles contributes slightly less to helping other household members avoid financial hardship, implying that nonfamily housemates have a greater tendency to keep income to themselves.     

Strategic non-marital cohabitation: theory and empirical implications

Non-marital cohabitation is a rapidly growing global phenomenon. Prior literature examines the puzzling empirical regularity that premarital cohabitation is associated with higher divorce rates. Since cohabitation should yield improved match-quality information, one might expect the opposite. This result, and its recent weakening, have been explored empirically and produced theoretically using matching models. In this paper, we develop an intra-household bargaining model of alternative dating and cohabitation paths to marriage in which higher relationship exit costs for cohabitors relative to daters generates the observed higher divorce rate. We also show that asymmetric exit costs can produce rejection and generate exits that would not otherwise occur. In addition, we show that even when cohabitors have lower average marriage quality, expected utility for a given match quality is higher, and some utility enhancing marriages that would not have taken place without cohabitation will occur in its presence.     

Family matters: the role of the family in immigrants' destination language acquisition

Studies of immigrants' destination language acquisition to date have focused on the individual. In contrast, this paper is concerned with the relationships among family members in the determinants of destination language proficiency among immigrants. A model of immigrant language proficiency is augmented to include dynamics among family members. It is tested using data on a sample of recent immigrants. Children are shown to have a negative effect on their mother's language proficiency, but no effect on their father's. There is a substantial positive correlation between the language skills of spouses. This is due to the correlation between spouses in both the measured and the unmeasured determinants of destination language skills, even when country of origin fixed effects are held constant.

Family income at the bottom and at the top: Income sources and family characteristics

Attention has recently been focused on wealth as a source of long-term economic security and on wealth ownership as a crucial aspect of the racial economic divisions in the United States. This literature, however has been concerned primarily with the wealth gap between poor and middle-class families, and between the white and black middle class. In this paper, we investigate the incomes of families at the top and bottom of the family income distribution. We examine the sources of income and the demographic characteristics of these high-income and low-income families using family level data from the 1988 to 2003 Current Population Surveys.     

The pill and partnerships: the impact of the birth control pill on cohabitation

This paper investigates the impact on cohabitation behavior of the introduction and dispersion of the birth control pill in the USA during the 1960s and early 1970s. A theoretical model generates several predictions that are tested using the first wave of the National Survey of Families and Households. Empirically, the causal effect is identified by exploiting plausibly exogenous variation in state laws granting access to the pill to unmarried women under age 21. The evidence shows that the pill was a catalyst that increased cohabitation??s role in selecting marriage partners, but did little in the short run to promote cohabitation as a substitute for marriage.     

Family structure and children's achievements

In this paper we estimate the relationships between several outcomes in early adulthood (educational attainment, economic inactivity, early childbearing, distress and smoking) and experience of life in a single-parent family during childhood. The analysis is performed using a special sample of young adults, who are selected from the first five waves of the British Household Panel Survey (1991–95) and can be matched with at least one sibling over the same period. We also perform level (logit) estimation using another sample of young adults from the BHPS. We find that: (i) experience of life in a single-parent family is usually associated with disadvantageous outcomes for young adults; (ii) most of the unfavourable outcomes are linked to an early family disruption, when the child was aged 0–5; and (iii) level estimates, whose causal interpretation relies on stronger assumptions, confirm the previous results and show that, for most outcomes, the adverse family structure effect persists even after controlling for the economic conditions of the family of origin. Received: 24 August 1998/Accepted: 21 January 2000     

The pill and partnerships: the impact of the birth control pill on cohabitation

This paper investigates the impact on cohabitation behavior of the introduction and dispersion of the birth control pill in the USA during the 1960s and early 1970s. A theoretical model generates several predictions that are tested using the first wave of the National Survey of Families and Households. Empirically, the causal effect is identified by exploiting plausibly exogenous variation in state laws granting access to the pill to unmarried women under age 21. The evidence shows that the pill was a catalyst that increased cohabitation’s role in selecting marriage partners, but did little in the short run to promote cohabitation as a substitute for marriage.     

Family sizes of children and family sizes of women

This paper demonstrates the relation that obtains between the average family size of women and the average family size of offspring of those women. It estimates the value of these two measures for cohorts of American women aged 45–49 in various years from 1890 to 1970. It shows that children born during the post-war baby boom actually derived from smaller families than those born during the low-fertility 1930’s; that under current patterns a woman would have to bear an average of almost two children fewer than were borne by her mother merely to keep population fertility rates constant from generation to generation; and that average family size for nonwhite children exceeds that for white by 50 percent, although the racial difference in family sizes of women is only 19 percent.     

Family structure and the transition to early parenthood

With the rise in out-of-wedlock childbearing and divorce in the last quarter of the twentieth century, an increasing proportion of children have been exposed to a variety of new family forms. Little research has focused on the consequences of childhood family structure for men’s transition to fatherhood or on the family processes that account for the effects of family structure on the likelihood that young women and men become first-time unmarried parents, what we now call “fragile families.” The data come from the linked Children and Young Adult samples of the 1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY79), which provide information on the children of the women of the NLSY79 from birth until they enter young adulthood. Females growing up with a single parent and males experiencing an unstable family transition to parenthood early, particularly to nonresidential fatherhood for males. For males, the effects are strongly mediated by parenting processes and adolescent behaviors and are shaped by economic circumstances. Having experienced multiple transitions as a child is associated with a reduced likelihood that males father their first child within marriage and an increased likelihood that they become fathers within cohabitation, demonstrating how changes in family structure alter family structure patterns over time and generations.     

Income dynamics in couples and the dissolution of marriage and cohabitation

Several studies have shown that a wife's strong (socio)economic position is associated with an increase in the risk of divorce. Less is known about such effects for cohabiting relationships. Using a unique and large-scale sample of administrative records from The Netherlands, we analyze the link between couples' income dynamics and union dissolution for married and cohabiting unions over a 10-year period. We find negative effects of household income on separation and positive effects of the woman's relative income, in line with earlier studies. The shape of the effect of the woman's relative income, however, depends on the type of union. Movements away from income equality toward a male-dominant pattern tend to increase the dissolution risk for cohabiting couples, whereas they reduce the dissolution risk for married couples. Movements away from income equality toward a female-dominant pattern (reverse specialization) increase the dissolution risks for both marriage and cohabitation. The findings suggest that equality is more protective for cohabitation, whereas specialization is more protective for marriage, although only when it fits a traditional pattern. Finally, we find that the stabilizing effects of income equality are more pronounced early in the marriage and that income equality also reduces the dissolution risk for same-sex couples.     

Reassessing the link between premarital cohabitation and marital instability

Premarital cohabitation has been found to be positively correlated with the likelihood of marital dissolution in the United States. To reassess this link, I estimate proportional hazard models of marital dissolution for first marriages by using pooled data from the 1988, 1995, and 2002 surveys of the National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG). These results suggest that the positive relationship between premarital cohabitation and marital instability has weakened for more recent birth and marriage cohorts. Using multiple marital outcomes for a person to account for one source of unobserved heterogeneity, panel models suggest that cohabitation is not selective of individuals with higher risk of marital dissolution and may be a stabilizing factor for higher-order marriages. Further research with more recent data is needed to assess whether these results are statistical artifacts caused by data weaknesses in the NSFG.     

Implications of boundary choice for the measurement of residential mobility

Analyses of residential mobility are usually conditioned on a system of geography in which territory is divided into discrete units. Types of movement are defined in terms of these units, the most important distinction being that between local mobility and migration. Here we examine explicitly the implications of the choice of the migration-defining boundary in the U.S. over the 1940-1980 period. We demonstrate how boundary choice influences the extent and character of selectivity of the mobile population by using demographic and social characteristics. It appears that over time the state line may be replacing the county line in distinguishing kinds of migrants. Further, our results point to a growing fraction of footloose migrants, not tied to local territory, identified by their migration history rather than demographic characteristics.     

Family structure and educational attainment of children: effects of remarriage

This study explores how remarriage alters the effect of living in a female-headed family on children's educational attainment. The analysis is based upon data from a mother/child extract taken from the 1984 March/April Match file of the Current Population Survey. Ordinary least squares regression analysis and logit analysis are used. The results are mixed. While remarriage mitigates the negative effects of single-parent family living on years of school completed and the probability of high school graduation, it exacerbates these effects on the probability of entering college by ages 18–20 years, especially for boys. Thus, while remarriage increases income and reduces time pressures compared to single-parent family living, the presence of a stepfather appears to complicate the college entrance decision.This research is based upon the Ph. D. thesis of Seung Sin Chung, submitted to the School of Human Resources and Family Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. We are grateful to John W. Graham for considerable effort in preparation of the data extract for this research as well as for comments, to Sara McLanahan for useful discussion, to John Boyd for excellent programming assistance, and to Se-jeong Yang and Yang-Suk Kim for able research assistance. This research was supported in part by NIH Grant # HD19350.     

Family structure transitions and adolescent well-being

Using data from Waves 1 and 2 of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, I extend prior research on family transitions and adolescent well-being by examining the influence of parental marital and cohabitation transitions on adolescent delinquency, depression, and school engagement. Adolescents who experienced a family transition reported decreased well-being, on average, relative to those in stable, two-biological-parent families. Specific comparisons of various types of family stability and change revealed that cohabitation is often associated with poorer outcomes. Moving out of a cohabiting stepfamily into a single-mother family was not harmful and was actually associated with improvements in school engagement. Moving into a cohabiting stepfamily from a single-mother family decreased adolescent well-being, and this impact was greater than that experienced by those who moved into a married stepfamily. Stable cohabiting stepfamilies were associated with lower levels of well-being than stable married stepfamilies. Formalization of a cohabiting stepfamily through marriage did not translate into any appreciable benefits for adolescent well-being.     

Considerations of family structure and gender composition: the lesbian and gay stepfamily

Lesbian and gay stepfamilies are unique family forms which must be investigated as such. This paper explores the similarities and dissimilarities between heterosexual stepfamilies and lesbian/gay stepfamilies, arguing that similarity of structure is impacted by gender composition. Utilizing face-to-face and telephone interviews with biological and stepparents in 23 lesbian and gay stepfamilies, the results show that while lesbian and gay stepfamilies share some challenges and strengths with heterosexual stepfamilies, they also evidence a unique and flexible adaptation to becoming a family. The paper is aimed at delineating future areas for lesbian and gay stepfamily research.     

The changing character of stepfamilies: implications of cohabitation and nonmarital childbearing

Divorce, nonmarital childbearing, and cohabitation are reshaping family experience in the United States. Because of these changes, our traditional definitions of families decreasingly capture the social units of interest. We have noted how a significant proportion of officially defined single-parent families actually are two-parent unmarried families. The present paper expands on this perspective with respect to stepfamilies. We must broaden our definition of stepfamilies to include cohabitations involving a child of only one partner, and must recognize the large role of nonmarital childbearing in the creation of stepfamilies. We find that cohabitation and nonmarital childbearing have been important aspects of stepfamily experience for at least two decades, and that this is increasingly so. To define stepfamilies only in terms of marriage clearly underestimates both the level and the trend in stepfamily experience: when cohabitation is taken into account, about two-fifths of all women and 30% of all children are likely to spend some time in a stepfamily.     

An analysis of the size of the family household and family structure in China]

Since 1949, great social and economic changes have taken place in China. The entire economic structure and social relations are no longer the way they used to be. These changes have also had a strong impact on the size of family households and family structure. Major changes are summarized as follows: (1) The size of the present family household has been greatly reduced from its earlier size. The main reason for this reduction in size is the change of the social system. Under the new social system, the natural population growth rate and family structure have shown the greatest change from the past. (2) The major change in family structure is that small families have replaced the traditional large families. Under the large family system, several generations may stay together as one household, and brothers do not divide the large family even after they are married. Under the small family system, a household is normally limited to the parents and their children. With the gradual disappearance of large families, small families are increasing rapidly. Some households with three generations living together are still in existence, and the young and the old may support each other in their daily life. Both in cities and in rural areas, the traditional custom of respecting one's old parents still exists. There must be a value and necessity for the existence of this particular kind of family structure.     

Marital dissolution among the 1958 British birth cohort: The role of cohabitation

This paper investigates the effect of previous cohabitation on marital stability among the 1958 British birth cohort. Prospective data from the National Child Development Study are used to investigate the way in which family background factors and early lifecourse experiences, including cohabitation, affect the risk of first marriage dissolution by age 33. Discrete time logistic regression hazards models are used to analyse the risk of separation in the first eight years of marriage. Many socio-economic and family background factors are found to act through more intermediate determinants, such as age at marriage and the timing of childbearing, to affect the risk of separation. Previous cohabitation with another partner and premarital cohabitation are both associated with higher rates of marital breakdown. The effect of premarital cohabitation is attenuated but remains significant once the characteristics of cohabitors are controlled, and cannot be explained by the longer time spent in a partnership.