The intergenerational transmission of divorce in cross-national perspective: results from the Fertility and Family Surveys

We used data on women's first marriages from the Fertility and Family Surveys to analyse the intergenerational transmission of divorce across 18 countries and to seek explanations in macro-level characteristics for the cross-national variation. Our results show that women whose parents divorced have a significantly higher risk of divorce in 17 countries. There is some cross-national variation. When compared with the USA, the association is stronger in six countries. This variation is negatively associated with the proportion of women in each cohort who experienced the divorce of their parents and with the national level of women's participation in the labour force during childhood. We conclude that differences in the contexts in which children of divorce learn marital and interpersonal behaviour affect the strength of the intergenerational transmission of divorce.     

The Age Difference Between Spouses: Variations among Developing Countries

Sub-national and cross-national variations in the age difference between spouses are investigated with data from the World Fertility Survey relating to 29 developing countries. Substantial variation within and between countries is evident. Analysis suggests that the relative age of prospective spouses is a factor taken into account in the marriage market. Observed variation in the age difference, within and between countries, cannot be explained as the simple by-product of the random matching of independently determined distributions of men's and women's ages at marriage. Certain age differences are avoided, others chosen more frequently. Preferred age differences appear to differ in the societies studied, however, and this variation can be directly interpreted in terms of two sets of factors: kinship structure and women's roles. The analysis also suggests that demographic determinants of the age difference, in particular age constraints on the pool of possible matches, are of less importance in explaining societal variations than are social structural factors.     

The impact of women's status on infant mortality rate: A cross-national analysis

A number of prior studies have attempted to account for cross-national differences in infant mortality rate using a variety of economic, demographic, and health related variables. These studies have given relatively little attention to the impact of predictors measuring the status of women. The present study, based on a sample of 96 less developed countries circa 1990, tests a series of hypotheses derived from gender stratification theory and industrialism theory. Evidence is presented of an inverse relationship between the status of women and infant mortality rate. The present study shows that it makes a difference whether we use relative or absolute measures of women's status and it shows that in addition to women's educational status, other dimensions of women's status particularly economic status and autonomy are also important predictors of infant mortality rate.     

Beyond Transmission: Intergenerational Patterns of Family Formation Among Middle-Class American Families

Research about parental effects on family behavior focuses on intergenerational transmission: that is, whether children show the same family behavior as their parents. This focus potentially overemphasizes similarity and obscures heterogeneity in parental effects on family behavior. In this study, we make two contributions. First, instead of focusing on isolated focal events, we conceptualize parents’ and their children’s family formation holistically as the process of union formation and childbearing between ages 15 and 40. We then discuss mechanisms likely to shape these intergenerational patterns. Second, beyond estimating average transmission effects, we innovatively apply multichannel sequence analysis to dyadic sequence data on middle-class American families from the Longitudinal Study of Generations (LSOG; N = 461 parent-child dyads). The results show three salient intergenerational family formation patterns among this population: a strong transmission, a moderated transmission, and an intergenerational contrast pattern. We examine what determines parents’ and children’s likelihood to sort into a specific intergenerational pattern. For middle-class American families, educational upward mobility is a strong predictor of moderated intergenerational transmission, whereas close emotional bonds between parents and children foster strong intergenerational transmission. We conclude that intergenerational patterns of family formation are generated at the intersection of macro-structural change and family internal psychological dynamics.     

The influence of parents’ marital quality on adult children’s attitudes toward marriage and its alternatives: Main and moderating effects

Drawing on a panel study of parents and children, we investigate linkages between parents' marital quality and adult children's attitudes toward a range of family issues, including premarital sex, cohabitation, lifelong singlehood, and divorce. We hypothesize that parents' marital quality will be negatively related to children's support for these behaviors in adulthood and that parents' marital quality will condition the intergenerational transmission of attitudes toward these issues. We find some evidence that parents' marital quality influences children's support for divorce and premarital sex. More important, our analyses show that parents' marital quality facilitates the intergenerational transmission of attitudes. Parents' attitudes toward premarital sex, cohabitation, and being single are more strongly linked to those same attitudes among their young adult children when parents' marital quality is high than when it is low.     

A Stalled Revolution? Change in Women's Labor Force Participation during Child-Rearing Years,Europe and the United States 1996–2016

While women's labor force participation rates (LFPRs) in the United States stalled over the last quarter-century, European countries exhibited a variety of trajectories. We draw on demographic and gender theories of women's life course to understand changes in women's LFPR during their prime child-rearing years. We build expectations about how aggregate trends may be driven by shifts in the prevalence of key demographic events such as child-rearing (i.e., compositional) versus shifts in the association of these events with women's LFP (i.e., behavioral). We use data from the European Union Labour Force Surveys and the US Current Population Survey in Kitagawa–Blinder–Oaxaca decomposition models to decompose trends in women's LFPR from 1996 to 2016 across 18 countries by educational attainment, partnership status, and parental status for women aged 20–44. Compositional and behavioral shifts positively contribute to higher LFPR in most countries, but lower rates in several others. Behavioral change is not widely shared across groups of women. Partnered mothers without college degrees are the main contributors to behavioral change and show the greatest variability across countries. We suggest greater research attention to this “missing middle,” as their LFP is key to understanding change during this period.     

Change and Continuity in the Formation of First Marital Unions in Australia

Marriage rates have now been falling in all Western countries for more than 20 years. Rising levels of women's education and employment, extra-marital cohabitation, and separation and divorce both preceded, and continue to accompany, this trend. We apply hazards models to a data-set rich in event-history information in order to study the links between these movements at the level of the individual in Australia. Contra the New Home Economists it transpires that longer education lowers women's propensity to marry, not by providing them with alternative careers to marriage, but by delaying their entry into the marriage market. Again, contra the New Home Economists, employment actually increases women's marriage probabilities. Cohabitation serves variously as an alternative and a prelude to formal marriage. Finally, in contrast with a study of marriage dissolution in Australia, the strengths of factors that variously inhibit or promote marriage, such as women's education and employment, have neither weakened nor strengthened during the recent past.     

No trend in the intergenerational transmission of divorce

Previous studies on trends in the intergenerational transmission of divorce have produced mixed findings, with two studies (McLanahan and Bumpass 1988; Teachman 2002) reporting no trend in divorce transmission and one study (Wolfinger 1999) finding that divorce transmission has weakened substantially. Using a stratified Cox proportional hazard model, we analyze data from the National Survey of Families and Households and find no evidence for any trend in divorce transmission. To reconcile apparent differences in results, we note that the General Social Survey data used by Wolfinger lack information on marital duration, permitting analysis only for whether respondents have divorced by interview. As a result, an apparent decline in divorce transmission could be due to inadequate adjustments for the longer exposures to risk by earlier marriage cohorts, yielding a higher probability of divorce by interview for earlier cohorts relative to more recent cohorts even if divorce risks are identical across all marriage cohorts. We confirm this possibility by using a series of discrete-time hazard logistic regressions to investigate the sensitivity of estimates of trends in divorce transmission to different adjustments for exposure to risk. We conclude that there has been no trend in the intergenerational transmission of divorce.     

Work-family conflict in comparative perspective: The role of social policies

This study focuses on the role of social policies in mitigating work-family incompatibilities in 27 countries. We ask whether work-family conflict is reduced in countries that provide family-friendly policies and flexible employment arrangements, and whether women and men are similarly affected by such policies. The study, based on the ISSP 2002, demonstrates considerable variation among countries in the perceived work-family conflict. In all but two countries, women report higher levels of conflict than men. At the individual level, working hours, the presence of children and work characteristics affect the perception of conflict. At the macro level, childcare availability and to a certain extent maternity leave reduce women's and men's sense of conflict. Additionally, the availability of childcare facilities alleviates the adverse effect of children on work-family balance for mothers while flexible job arrangements intensify this effect.     

The Intergenerational Effect and Second Childbirth: Survey Findings from the Shaanxi Province of China

Traditionally, the fertility behaviors of Chinese people have been deeply influenced by the entrenched patriarchal, patrilineal, and patrilocal systems. Women’s fertility decisions and behaviors are significantly influenced by their parents and parents-in-law. Given the current social changes with low fertility levels and intentions in China, it is still unclear about the actual link between the fertility behavior and the intergenerational effect. Therefore, we utilize data from 1577 questionnaires, conducted in 2013 in the Shaanxi Province of northwest China about fertility intentions and behaviors, and use the event history analysis method and the Cox proportional hazard model to explore the association between intergenerational effects and women’s second childbirths. “The number of the parental generation’s children” and “the living arrangements of the parental generation” are employed to measure the intergenerational effect. The findings show that there is an existence of intergenerational transmission of fertility between women of childbearing age and their parents-in-law, rather than their biological parents when considering the effects of their parents-in-law. In addition, the study finds a significant correlation between women’s second childbirth and the living arrangements of their parents-in-law, but no significant association with the living arrangements of their biological parents. These results support that the patriarchal, patrilineal, and patrilocal systems play a role in women’s fertility behaviors in contemporary China.     

The influence of parents’ marital dissolutions on children’s attitudes toward family formation

We investigate the influence of parents’ marital dissolutions on their children’s attitudes toward several dimensions of family formation. Hypotheses focus on the role of parents’ attitudes as a mechanism linking parents’ behavior to their children’s attitudes. We test these hypotheses using intergenerational panel data that include measures of parents’ attitudes taken directly from parents and measures of children’s attitudes taken directly from children. Results demonstrate strong effects of parental divorce, remarriage, and widowhood on children’s attitudes toward premarital sex, cohabitation, marriage. childbearing, and divorce. The results also show that parents’ own attitudes link their behavior to their children’s attitudes, although substantial effects of parental behavior remain after controlling for parents’ attitudes.     

Women's Responsibilities,Freedoms, and Pleasures

In the building of the Swedish welfare state, men and women have been seen as equal in their roles as parents, breadwinners, and citizens. This conception is not confirmed by the images produced by advertising. The article presents an analysis of alcohol-related advertisements published in Swedish women's magazines from the 1960s to the 2000s. The advertisements are approached as representations of gendered performances in which gender is made visible “here and now” by placing women in particular subject positions that are related to private or public spheres and associated with specific kinds of gender norms reflecting women's shifting responsibilities, freedoms, and pleasures. The article asks what kind of drinking-related subject positions have been portrayed as desirable in women's magazine advertisements over the past few decades and how those positions have changed as we move closer to the present day. The analysis reveals both continuity and variability in alcohol-related subject positions in Swedish women's magazine advertisements. It shows how women's responsibilities, freedoms, and pleasures have expanded from the traditional domain of the private sphere to multiple new areas as Sweden has developed from a modern welfare state to a late-modern competition state. However, this does not mean that the traditional gender norms have disintegrated and been replaced by equal gender norms. Rather, it seems that traditional gender norms continue to be reproduced in alcohol-related advertising.     

Residential proximity of parents and their adult offspring in the United Kingdom, 2009–10

Using data from a large household survey representative of the UK population, we studied how closely parents and adult children live to each other. We show that residential mobility over the life course tends to increase with the physical distance between the homes of parent and child. There are large differences in intergenerational proximity between the foreign-born and UK-born, and between ethnic groups. The determinants of intergenerational proximity from the parent's viewpoint are not identical to those from the child's viewpoint. Contrary to the findings of some earlier studies, intergenerational proximity, from the child's viewpoint, does not vary with the number of siblings. But from the parent's viewpoint, having more children is unambiguously associated with a higher probability of living close to at least one child. We end with a brief discussion of some possible implications of several long-term demographic trends in the UK for intergenerational proximity.     

Intergenerational reliance on social assistance: Evidence from Canada

This paper provides the first analysis of the intergenerational transmission of participation in a Canadian social assistance program. Two sources of intergenerational transmission are taken into account: one that is due to a possible causal link between parents' and children's participation, and one that is due to a correlation between individual and environment specific characteristics across generations. The basic data come from the Québec government's administrative records and cover 17,203 young people who were 18 years old in 1990 and whose parents were recipients of social assistance during at least one month between 1979 and 1990. The results reveal that, on average, a one-percentage unit increase in parental participation during the youth's pre-adult years (age 7–17) raises the youth's participation rate by 0.29 percentage unit during early adulthood (age 18–21). This impact is stronger during the early stages of childhood (age 7–9) and during late adolescence (age 16–17).     

The Gender‐Gap Reversal in Education and Its Effect on Union Formation: The End of Hypergamy?

Newly released census microdata reveal the nearly worldwide and substantial decline in educational hypergamy (women marrying men with higher educational attainment) across 56 countries from the 1970s to the 2000s. We examine the extent to which the observed decrease in hypergamy is connected to the worldwide rise in female educational attainment. Our results show that educational hypergamy is an enduring form of gender inequality in union formation across the countries examined but that it has been decreasing over the last few decades and in some countries has reversed in recent years. Overall, we find a strong association between hypergamy and gender differences in educational attainment. Societies in which the female educational advantage is greater tend to have lower levels of educational hypergamy. There is a tendency toward a joint increase in women's educational levels and a decrease in educational hypergamy. This article underlines the influence of women's educational opportunities on the increase in gender symmetry in assortative mating, which leads us to predict the end of educational hypergamy.     

Friendships Among Old Women

Because of widowhood, divorce, retirement, and prejudice against them, old women are in special need of friendships with other women. Old women's friendships have many valuable functions. It is dangerous to depend on just one friend. There are impediments to making friendships in old age including projection of negativity about again on other old women, lack of resources and transportation, fears of loss, invasion of privacy, obligations, and preference for males. Some women settle for paid therapists as friends or for self help groups. Communities can provide activities fostering friendships, and women themselves can learn how to make connections.     

A Gendered Assessment of Highly Skilled Emigration

Although women form a large and increasing proportion of international migrants, women's mobility has generally been overlooked in the literature. Quantifying and characterizing female migration should lead to a better understanding of the forces that shape international migration. We build an original data set providing gender‐disaggregated indicators of international migration by educational attainment for 195 source countries in 1990 and 2000. We find that women represent an increasing share of the immigration stock in the OECD countries and exhibit higher skilled emigration rates than men.     

The effect of divorce on intergenerational transfers: New evidence

This paper draws on new data on intergenerational transfers of time and money that were collected in the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. We use these data to examine the effects of divorce on these transfers. We find that the timing of divorce is critical. Fathers and mothers involved in late divorces have similar levels of transfers with their adult children, while divorce during a child’s childhood years increases transfers with mothers and sharply lowers them with fathers. Somewhat surprisingly, we find no evidence that divorced fathers who paid child support are more likely to be involved in intergenerational transfers than those who did not pay child support.     

Trends in women' work participation

The changes which have taken place in 15 countries of the Western world during the first half of this century with regard to the proportion of economically active to total females, have been studied ; some countries record a rise, others a fall. Further analysis shows that the participation of women in non-domestic work for pay has risen with only a few exceptions. The proportion of married women who are at work has also risen substantially in most of the English-speaking countries, as well as in Sweden.

Changes in population structure cannot explain these developments. The influence of economic factors is not simple to assess, but the main explanation for the rise in women's work participation appears to be full employment and the development of new industries, increasing the demand for labour, and at the same time helping to raise women's earnings relatively to those of men and thus encouraging women to take up paid work.

t is anticipated that female work participation will increase in the underdeveloped countries, where it is generally at a low level, and will remain high in the advanced countries, involving the continued employment of a substantial minority of married women. This calls for a reconsideration of social policy, since a single-earner grant to families where the woman's full-time attendance at home is required for the care of small children, might become more important than child endowment.     

Parental marital disruption and intergenerational transfers: An analysis of lone elderly parents and their children

Although one of the most marked demographic trends observed over the twentieth century is the increased rate of divorce, relatively little research has explored the effects of these changing marital patterns in the context of an aging society. Using a sample of lone elderly parents and their adult children, we analyze the direct and indirect effects of marital disruption on four important dimensions of intergenerational transfers: coresidence, financial assistance, adult children's provision of informal care, and parental purchase of paid care. Our findings suggest that divorce has deleterious effects on intergenerational transfers, particularly for elderly fathers. Remarriage further reduces exchange. Our results reveal that parents engage in lower levels of transfers with stepchildren relative to biological children. Moreover, intergenerational transfers are sensitive to characteristics of biological children but not to those of stepchildren. Taken together, these results suggest that exchange at the end of the life course continues to be adversely affected by marital disruption.