Uncertain Transitions and Precarious Futures which is launched today (and is available here and here if you are looking for a stocking filler for that special someone in your life).
Essentially the idea is that while traditionally, measuring the start of a union was relatively easy since it was demarcated by a formally recognised institution, marriage. Obviously this is no longer the case- a large proportion of unions are now cohabiting, even when this union is permanent and lifelong, and for all intents and purposes marriage but not formally recognised. This leaves us with something of a problem when trying to measure these unions: relying on indicators such as whether a couple is married or not is obviously not sufficient. If we consider the example below from two of the latent classes from Perelli-Harris and Lyons-Amos 2015: lines in the figure represent the partnership state at a particular age: green represents direct marriage, red marriage where the couple lived together before being married and orange represents cohabitation
Source: Perelli-Harris and Lyons-Amos 2015 pp. 160
As we can see, for the vast majority of the lifecourse, women in both of these classes are married to their partner. The only real difference occurs around age 20: in class 3 women live with their partner before marrying later, while in class 1 they do not. It's not surprising to note that class 3 has effectively replaced class 1 as the form by which life long and early marriage is exercised, at least in the West, as cohabitation prior to marriage became an institutionalised part of marriage (e.g. Cherlin 2010 The Marriage Go Round).
It's this institutionalisation of cohabitation prior to marriage that causes our measurement problem: how do we distinguish between unions which are effectively lifelong unions which will be formalised later- or not at all- from those which are shorter term unions? The idea might be that we look at other indicators which are correlated with permanent union formation which is not marital. This borrows heavily from the idea presented in Holland (2011)- who uses housing purchase as a marker of stability- and some of my other work which leads the argument: union formation is no longer predicated on a single formal event (marriage) but rather a series of interrelated events with no certain ordering, but which occurring at about the same time in the lifecourse mark a more permanent union state.
Clearly the interrelation of these events will tend to change over time: for instance the waning importance of marriage and well as much lower importance in some contexts means that these correlations will tend to vary across space and time. The focus of the book chapter was to look at this, but also to examine whether certain seminal events (such as the Great Recession) were disruptive and invoke sea changes in the relationship between both demographic and other life course transitions- or merely resulted in postponement of all lifecourse events. The latter is generally true (see excerpt from the book below): both demographic as well as labour force events tend to occur later to women who make their key transitions post recession as we can see below
Estimated probit coefficients for the effect of
recession on transition intensities
Notes: Coefficients are probit coefficents for the effect of the Great Recesion on transition rates: more negative coefficients means slower/later events. Error bars denote 95% credible intervals
Source: Lyons-Amos and Schoon 2017 in Schoon and Bynner 2017 pp. 307
Generally then, the onset of the Great Recession in 2008 tended to retard not only labour market transitions such as getting a job (as would be expected), but also demographic transitions like living with a partner and having children (this latter point I have explored elsewhere in this blog and in publication). This adds some weight to the idea that a broader set of correlated indicators can be used to measure union formation. That said, there is also evidence that the recession changed the interrelation between these indicators: the figure below looks at the covariance between the timing of forming a coresidential relationship and having a child. Although weakly powered, there is some evidence that there is a change in the interrelationship here: post recession unions formed are less likely to result in childbearing at about the same time
Estimated covariance between timing of first child and forming
first co-residential union
Notes: Coefficients are covariance for the effect of the Great Recession on transition rates: more positive covariance means that union formation and childbearing are more likely to occur at the same lifecourse stage
Source: Lyons-Amos and Schoon 2017 in Schoon and Bynner 2017 pp. 313
There are probably a few take homes from this then. Firstly, measuring union formation by single indicators is probably no longer sufficient given the complexity and heterogeneity of union behaviour, and incorporating other demographic indicators such as childbearing or house purchase or even those which we might traditionally think of as belonging in the realms of other social sciences might give us better delineation between more and less permanent relationships. Second, however, the precise relationship between these indicators is not fixed and will not get us back the sort of neat cut-off that single indicators such as marriage did in the past, due to the fact that interrelations will tend to vary across country context, across generations, and as we see in the book chapter, in response to large external shocks.
