Abstract
A profound reduction in Saudi Arabia’s fertility rate has influenced household size and family composition, slowly and steadily. Moreover, the increasing number of never married women, marital dissolutions, women entering into the labor force, and so on has also influenced changes in Saudi Arabian families. Family demographics influence values, norms, and filial responsibilities of not only family members but also of society. Families are changing globally as a result of transitions in marriage, fertility, and livelihoods. In Islamic countries such as Saudi Arabia, studies of family demography aim to understand the emerging issues and at the same time to preserve and strengthen traditional family values. This article examines changes in fertility patterns and extends into the structure, distribution, composition, roles, and responsibility of families, taking into account changes in size, composition and distribution, and median age of families. It has found that the analyses and interpretations, in this article, need to be endorsed where those indicators discussed help identify the emerging issues of family demographic transition and changes in the family values and traditions and thus facilitate policy formulation. This study makes use of two sets of data: censuses (i.e., 1992, 2004, and 2010) and demographic surveys (i.e., 2000, 2007, and 2016).
Highlights
Families constitute the fundamental societal unit, primarily responsible for economic support, protection, social relationships, reproduction, and well-being—physical and mental (Solheim & Wachwithan, 2018)
A positive and healthy family life supported through well-developed, well-implemented, and well-monitored family life education programs is necessary with priority to preventive, educational, and collaborative approaches to empower families and individuals by addressing and resolving family issues, as stated by Tiliouine and Achoui (2018). This analysis used published classified national-level data of various censuses and demographic surveys conducted by the General Authority of Statistics, Saudi Arabia
Certain indicators developed to reflect family demography were derived by keeping the number of households as the denominator, giving rise to various dimensions of marital behavior, population by broad age groups, family composition, marital status, and employment per household
Summary
Families constitute the fundamental societal unit, primarily responsible for economic support, protection, social relationships, reproduction, and well-being—physical and mental (Solheim & Wachwithan, 2018). Families are changing globally, including the Arabian region because of transitions in marriage, childbearing, fertility, lifestyle, increased participation of women in the labor force, educational achievements, cultural changes such as travel and tourism reflecting modernization, and a rapid pace of urbanization (Al-Khraif et al, 2015; Crabtree, 2007; El-Haddad, 2003; Hamadeh et al, 2008; Olmsted, 2011) Such changes in families are widespread around the world depending on specific socioeconomic and demographic conditions leading to societal issues: economic, educational, work–family, parenting, sexuality, and gender creating specific problems of substance abuse, domestic violence, unemployment, debt, child abuse, and so on, addressed effectively under the “healthy family functioning” and “happy families in a peaceful society” (Robila & Taylor, 2018; Tiliouine & Achoui, 2018). New family structures can take time to develop along with its effects on the division of labor and distribution of power (Willikens, 2010) as against the widely held family value, that is, “men are providers and women are home makers” (Hwang, 2018; Tiliouine & Achoui, 2018)
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