Abstract
Social cohesion in destination countries is an increasingly important issue due to the multiethnic structures in these countries and due to ongoing international migration. Union formation of individuals across different backgrounds can be seen as an indicator of social cohesion. However, this phenomenon is important not only in the case of first generation migrants but also for their descendants. Thus, this paper analyzes the determinants of intergroup union formation patterns of the native born individuals with a foreign background focusing on the role of parental background in addition to individual as well as marriage market characteristics. High quality data at the individual level, from Statistics Sweden, for the whole population of interest is utilized. The results indicate that parental composition is an important determinant of union formation behavior. Furthermore, there are gender specific pathways of the parental background effects.
Highlights
How individuals sort into household units has been widely studied in various disciplines due to its implications regarding various individual outcomes such as fertility, employment, income and due to its implications regarding the development of social and economic inequality across groups over time and across generations
To explore social cohesion at the most intimate level for native born individuals, this paper has investigated the determinants of union formation patterns of native born individuals with a foreign background
Those who are in a cohabitation relationship are more likely to be in an intergroup union
Summary
How individuals sort into household units has been widely studied in various disciplines due to its implications regarding various individual outcomes such as fertility, employment, income and due to its implications regarding the development of social and economic inequality across groups over time and across generations. As documented and theorized in the literature in social sciences as well as biology, partnership formation is more likely to take place among similar individual characteristics, so called positive assortative mating, on characteristics such as education, income, socioeconomic background, ethnicity, religion and religiosity as well as height, weight, IQ, and social class [1,2,3,4]. Consistent with this literature, the tendency of immigrants to marry within their group is a common finding [5,6]. One of the very important challenges in relation to this type of data is related to ‘ethnic attrition’, where for e.g. native born individuals do not self-identify as being from a certain background despite having foreign born parents, disappearing from the sample [13,14,15]
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