Cohabitation and social background: Trends observed for Swedish women born between 1936 and 1960

Abstract

This paper throws some light on changing family-building patterns in Sweden during the 1960s and 1970s. The family-building events analyzed are first informal cohabitation, first marriage, birth of first child (both outside a union and within a consensual union), and separations from childless informal cohabitation. Results from three previous studies are first summarized. These analyze the patterns by socio-economic and regional origin, applying multiple-decrement techniques separately for each background factor. The new results presented here are based on analyses that use multiplicative hazard models, permitting isolation of the effects of socio-economic background and region of childhood and adolescence respectively. It is generally found that socio-economic background is more important than the region where the woman grew up. Marriage intensities, however, which exhibit a clear regional pattern, are exceptions to this.