Family Formation Process Research Articles

Padres y escuelas que hacen crecer en el siglo XXI

<p>Los autores, educadores, se preguntan en este artículo por lo que ellos consideran los principales retos que tiene señalada la educación de los hijos: la influencia de las nuevas tecnologías, la invación por parte del adulto en ocasiones del espacio o espacios del niño, la confusión entre tiempo del adulto y tiempo del niño, las nuevas formas de relación y autoridad y el recurso a la pedagogía del amor. En un contexto cultural donde los niños empiezan a escasear, con el epílogo se plantean el gran reto de la sociedad sin hijos. En ese escenario quizás siga siendo mejor continuar planteándose los problemas que visibilizan la existencia de los niños.</p><p> </p>

Foster Parent’s Perspectives Regarding the Transition of a New Placement into their Home: An Exploratory Study

This qualitative study examined foster parents’ perceptions of the initial transition period in order to better understand the family formation process that occurs when a new placement is transitioned into the home. A snowball sampling method was used to recruit ten foster parents to participate. A constant comparative analysis of interview transcripts guided by grounded theory approaches yielded a model of the foster family transition process that identified three main tasks: establishing trust and a sense of belonging; re-establishing family homeostasis; and working with external stakeholders. Responsive, trauma-sensitive care; realistic expectations; parenting skills; and access to resources facilitated foster family movement through the transition process. While foster families shared many of the same tasks as other family forms adding a new member, unique aspects of the foster family context were identified. Foster families often form with an incomplete knowledge of the new family member’s medical and trauma history and under the oversight of the social service system. Unlike other family types, permanence is not the primary objective of foster family formation. Study findings have implications for foster parent training and support during the transition of a new placement and affirm the value of including foster parents’ perspectives in research.

Polki w Norwegii – decyzje i plany prokreacyjne

Given the scale and pace of post-EU accession migrations from Poland, as well as age and gender structure of their participants, an increased interest in family behaviour and intentions of this group has been recently noted. The observed interrelations between migration and family building processes are multidimensional. Thus, this study aims to investigate interrelations between migration, childbearing decisions and intentions of Polish female migrants in Norway. The paper is based on a survey research conducted among Polish female migrants in 2014–2015. The results show that majority of immigrants was childless upon arrival. For those, who had a child before migration, the mobility occurred in a relatively early stage of family formation process. However, a concentration of births shortly after migration can be observed. This concerns mostly women migrating to join their husbands or partners. An opposite evidence is observed regarding respondents who had one child upon arrival to Norway – only few of them proceeded to the second birth. Almost 58% of respondents wants to give birth to their next child in Norway. More importantly, majority of women planning a long-term stay in Norway still has positive or uncertain childbearing intentions.

Conceptual foundations of qualitative life course research

Analyzing biographies is a main field of qualitative social research that studies individuals’ sensemaking in regard to transitions and life projects. The paper presents concepts for linking the macrosocial and micro-social levels in life course analysis. First, the concept of “status passage” is reviewed, with a focus on social structure, institutions, and biography. Second, the concept of “selfsocialization” is introduced, highlighting the notion of the “biographical actor”. Third, recent elaborations of the concept of “agency” in life course research are discussed. Fourth, two examples of qualitative longitudinal research are presented: one on occupational careers, another on the process of family formation. Finally, methodological implications are sketched.

Normative Ideals, “Alternative” Realities: Perceptions of Interracial Dating among Professional Latinas and Black Women

Family types continue to expand in the U.S., yet normative patterns of endogamy and the privileging of nuclear families persist. To understand how professional women of color navigate endogamy and family ideals, I draw on 40 in-depth interviews of professional Black women and Latinas to ask how they construct partner preferences. I find that professional Latinas and Black women prefer same-race, similarly educated partners but report significant barriers to satisfying these desires. Respondents’ experiences with racism, the rejection of ethno-racial and cultural assimilation, gendered racism from men of color, and the college gender gap emerge as mechanisms for endogamous preferences. These preferences resist and support hegemonic family formation, an ideological and behavioral process that privileges, white, middle class, endogamous, heteronormative ideals for families comprising courtship, marriage, and biological childbearing. By challenging the racial devaluation of people of color while preferring the normativity that endogamy offers, the women in this study underscore the fluidity embedded in endogamy.

Family formation and crime: What role for the family network?

Abstract Being part of a family involved with crime may shape one's own family formation process through constraints in the partner market and one's own family-related preferences. In this paper, we examine the role crime in family networks plays for two important family processes: the transition to parenthood and the transition to first marriage. Using high-quality, individual-level register data from Norway, we estimate discrete-time event history models of the transition to first marriage and parenthood. Results show that crime in the family network, for both men and women, is associated with lower transition rates to first marriage and higher transition rates to first birth. (104 words)

Family Formation Processes: Assessing the Need for a New Nationally Representative Household Panel Survey in the United States.

The American family has undergone rapid transformation. Careful measurement attention to family formation is important because families are at the heart of numerous decisions, roles, and responsibilities with implications for understanding the well-being of families, adults and children. This paper considers whether there is a need for a new household panel study that addresses family formation. This paper consists of a review of the recent body of population-based, American surveys and finds a considerable gap in the ability to study the implications of families for the health and well-being of Americans. Earlier panel surveys used to assess family life anchored questions around marital events, but changes in family patterns require attention to a more diverse set of family forms. The paper concludes with recommendations for a multi-purpose panel study. The key challenge is to keep to pace with complexity and changes in American family life while at the same time maintaining a parsimonious set of survey questions.

Vetting and Letting: Cohabiting Stepfamily Formation Processes in Low-Income Black Families.

The authors examined cohabiting union formation processes by analyzing in-depth interview data collected from 30 individuals in cohabiting relationships: 15 low-income Black mothers of adolescents and their partners. Prior research suggests that cohabiting union formation is a gradual, nondeliberative process. In contrast, most couples in this study described a gradual but highly deliberative process. Mothers focused primarily on vetting their partners to ensure child well-being and less on when and how their partners officially came to live with them, a process the authors call vetting and letting. Mothers delineated 4 strategies to ensure their child's well-being when vetting their partners, and their partners reported that they understood the importance of participating in this process. The authors argue that vetting and letting is a child-centered family formation process, not a partner-centered union formation process, and that cohabiting union processes may vary substantially by subpopulation.

Religiosity, gender attitudes and women’s labour market participation and fertility decisions in Europe

The Second Demographic Transition (SDT) theory underlines the importance of changing values and attitudes to explain the trend toward low fertility and raising female labour market participation. We contribute to this debate comparing religiosity and gender attitudes over several European countries using three waves of the European Values Study (1990, 1999 and 2008). By dealing with the issues of measurement invariance and endogeneity between values and behaviour, our results support some critiques of the SDT theory. The pace of the process of sociocultural change has not been the same across European countries and the forerunners of the SDT, that is, the most secularized and gender-egalitarian societies, now have the highest female labour market participation rates and the highest fertility. We provide evidence for a ‘macro–micro paradox’ regarding the role of values on family behaviours. Religiosity is positively correlated with fertility and housewifery, while gender attitudes are only correlated with women’s labour market decisions. These correlations are stronger in more traditional countries, even if aggregate fertility is lower. We stress the necessity to integrate cultural and structural explanations, suggesting the lack of family policies and the rigidity of the family formation process as possible mechanisms to unravel this paradox.

Trust, responsibility, and freedom: Focus-group research on contemporary patterns of union formation in Russia

AbstractBACKGROUNDWhile some studies directly address the issue of changes in union formation in Russia and Eastern Europe, few have focused on attitudes and norms regarding marriage and cohabitation. In Russia cohabitation has risen sharply in the last decades, but recently its level has stabilized and even decreased slightly.OBJECTIVEWe intend to highlight gender and educational differences in perceptions of the advantages and disadvantages of cohabitation vs. marriage.METHODSWe conducted 8 focus groups in Moscow in January 2012 (4 with men, 4 with women, half with higher educated participants and half with lower educated participants).RESULTSParticipants claimed that trust between men and women underlies preferences for marriage or cohabitation. Participants' religious beliefs form a 'three stages of union' theory: cohabitation in the beginning, civil marriage later when trust has developed, and finally a church wedding when trust is established. In union formation the participants' ideals are the values of responsibility, freedom, fidelity, and trust. The level of trust is highest for proponents of marriage and ideational cohabitors. People without a strong preference for a certain type of union have the lowest level of interpersonal trust.CONCLUSIONSIn a society that currently can be considered anomic, interpersonal trust was found to be the most important factor underlying expressed ideals in choice of union type. It takes different forms for adherents of marriage (trust with closed eyes) and adherents of cohabitation (trust with open eyes).1. IntroductionWhile some studies directly address the issue of changes in union formation in Eastern Europe, including Russia (Perelli-Harris and Gerber 2011; Hoem et al. 2009; PerelliHarris and Isupova 2012), few have focused specifically on attitudes and norms regarding marriage and cohabitation. Cohabitation has increased significantly in Russia during the last few decades .According to the census, the share of couples cohabiting increased from 9.8% in 2002 to 13.2% in 2010 (All-Russian Census 2002, 2010). Another study in 2004 found that around 25.7% of the total of partnered respondents had never married their current partners (N=7645) (GGS 2004). Nonmarital childbearing also became more common, with 30% of births occurring outside of marriage in 2005, although by 2011 this had gradually decreased to 24.6% (Zakharov 2011). This figure is not as high as in other countries in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union (e.g., 57.4% of births to cohabitors in 2012 in Bulgaria, and 58.4% in Estonia, Demoscope Weekly, 2013), but is still remarkable considering that in previous decades childbearing within marriage was nearly universal in Russia. Indeed, about half of the increase in nonmarital fertility has been to cohabiting couples (Zakharov 2011), suggesting that cohabitation has become a new part of the family formation process in Russia.In Russia there is very little understanding of how people talk about cohabitation and marriage: the meanings attached to these types of behavior are unclear. This makes explanation of recent fluctuations in nonmarital fertility very difficult. In our view, greater insight is needed into the nature of cohabitation and how people discuss it. Thus, in this study we use focus group research to explore discourses on cohabitation and marriage. Focus group methodology allows us to reveal social norms and attitudes and discourses regarding marriage and cohabitation, and to see how people interact when discussing cohabitation. Our main research questions concerned the meaning of cohabitation for people choosing (or not choosing) this union arrangement; differences between marriage, cohabitation, and simply dating; advantages and disadvantages of cohabitation and marriage; reasons for the increase and decrease in the number of people living together without marrying; and culturally specific patterns behind cohabitation in Russia. …

Changing Times – Family Formation Processes among Turkish Immigrant Women and Their Danish Majority Peers

This article compares the family formation processes among young Turkish immigrant women in Denmark with those of their majority Danish peers. The study draws on biographical interviews and available statistics, both of which reveal marked differences between the two groups. The majority women's family formation processes consist of many uncoupled and reversible transitions, focusing on “gaining experience” until making the irreversible decision of having their first child. This birth often occurs before marriage in the Danish context, which subsequently institutionalizes the already formed family. In contrast, Turkish immigrant women's family formation processes consist of tightly clustered transitions, occurring in a normatively sanctioned order. While the timing of these transitions in the 1990s clearly resembled the processes found in Turkish villages, this timing has since changed. Greater participation in education in Denmark contributes both to young Turkish women increasingly postponing marriage and the partner selection processes changing considerably. While Turkish immigrant women are now getting married at older ages, some do so without changing the sequencing of other family formation transitions. Thus, marrying later possibly also means delaying their first sexual experience and moving away from the parental home. In other cases, Turkish immigrant women engage in pre-marital sex but often seek to conceal this from their surroundings.

Arreglos conyugales en Baja California y sus jóvenes adultos

La formación de uniones libres o consensuales ha ido en aumento en México y su región norte no es una excepción. Información del Censo Mexicano de Población y Vivienda de 2010 y de la Encuesta Sobre la Salud Reproductiva de los Adolescentes en Baja California, 2006, indica que la elección de la unión libre como arreglo conyugal se refleja de manera clara entre los y las jóvenes bajacalifornianas adultas en general, pero particularmente entre aquellos y aquellas que residen en Tijuana y Rosarito. Asimismo, la formación de uniones libres entre los y las jóvenes del estado parece estar asociada al papel que tradicionalmente ha tenido la unión libre en el proceso de formación familiar, mediante el nacimiento de hijos. Esto parece indicar una continuidad en la importancia que han tenido las uniones libres o consensuales en el proceso de formación familiar en México, pero ahora en proporciones mayores entre las y los jóvenes de las nuevas generaciones.

Fifty Years of Family Change

The first section of the article discusses how and why we went from a relatively undifferentiated family system in the middle of the last century to the current system of diverse family forms. Even conceding that the family system was always less simple than it now appears in hindsight, there is little doubt that we began to depart from the dominant model of the nuclear-family household in the late 1960s. I explain how change is a result of adaptation by individuals and family members to changing economic, demographic, technological, and cultural conditions. The breakdown of the gender-based division of labor was the prime mover in my view. Part two of the article thinks about family complexity in the United States as largely a product of growing stratification. I show how family formation processes associated with low human capital produces complexity over time in family systems, a condition that may be amplified by growing levels of inequality. The last part of the article briefly examines complexity in a changing global context. I raise the question of how complexity varies among economically developed nations with different family formation practices and varying levels of inequality.

De-standardization of family trajectories: Childbearing in unmarried cohabitation not only as an alternative but also as a pathway to marriage

Based on a secondary analysis of data from qualitative research of unmarried parental couples, this article explores childbearing in unmarried cohabitation from the perspective of de-standardisation and individualization of family trajectories. Drawing upon a differentiation of their situation at the moment around childbirth and their actual attitudes, it distinguishes heterogeneity of views of unmarried parents on the position of an unmarried cohabitation with child in their family trajectories. Overall, the analysis identifies five dimensions of individualization of attitudes in family formation processes: (1) diversification of views on timing of entry to marriage in terms of age and length of unmarried cohabitation, (2) an emphasis on situational barriers to entry into marriage, (3) weakening of influence of the family of orientation, (4) a consideration of views on the legal (dis)advantages of marriage, and (5) different symbolic meanings attached to marriage and unmarried cohabitation and to the status of married and unmarried partners.

Being ready for a child: A mixed-methods investigation of fertility intentions

This article aims to better understand the concept of fertility intentions with regard to family formation. Using a mixed-method approach, it combines qualitative and quantitative methods. During problem-centered interviews feeling ready was argued to be crucial for the decision to have a child. Readiness is considered to be mainly an emotional state of mind and refers not only to the individual itself but also to the partner and to the couple as a unit. Based on the qualitative results, additional questions were included in the ‘Generations and Gender Survey’ allowing to analyze the dimension of being ready also in a national representative dataset. Our quantitative results revealed that the feeling of being ready has additional explanatory power for childbearing intentions among childless men and women in Austria. Emotional factors such as the feeling of being ready are often neglected although they might broaden the understanding of the family formation process.

Transition to Adulthood Across Italy: A Comparison Between Northern and Southern Italian Young Adults

We explored the phenomenon of the transition to adulthood, focusing on how young people cope with various developmental tasks in relation to their expectations, future projects, fears and indecision in two Italian regional areas characterized by different trends in youth employability, higher educational attainment and family formation process. We measured self-perceived adulthood, self-reported satisfaction, independence, perceived support regarding personal relationships and practical and economical issues, personal projections and future life’s choices. We also explored the perception of self-fulfillment for the future concerning personal goals in life, such as in the spheres of work, studies and economic autonomy together with expectations for the quality of personal relationships. One hundred and sixty nonworking university students (M age = 22.6; SD = 2.77; range = 19–35) from the Universities of Turin and Palermo took part in this study. Sub-groups differed on self-perceived adulthood, self-reported satisfaction, independence, perceived support and self-fulfillment. Psychological and economic independence from the family of origin was most perceived by the participants from Turin who reported a higher degree of satisfaction regarding their choice of studies and their future perspective of self-fulfillment at work. Young people from Palermo highlighted personal relationships as an important source of perceived support.

Transitions within and from ethno-linguistically mixed and endogamous first unions in Finland

Utilizing longitudinal population register data from Finland, this study examines the influence of exogamy on transitions within and from first unions. The aim is to assess how ethno-linguistically mixed unions, consisting of Swedish speakers and Finnish speakers, differ from endogamous unions with respect to various transitions in the family formation process subsequent to entry into childless cohabitation. We find evidence of notable selection. The proportion of endogamous relationships increases during the course of the courtship process, and this selection is primarily driven by a higher separation risk of ethno-linguistically mixed unions. The stages in family formation consequently seem to work as a social filter, where the exogamy effect on the dissolution risk is particularly strong for couples who have come a long way in the process.

Cohabitation in Spain: No Longer a Marginal Path to Family Formation

Although many indicators reflect the marked retreat from marriage occurring in Spain since the 1980s, the diffusion of cohabitation has been slow. The confluence of very low and late fertility, latest‐late marriage, and low cohabitation has been largely regarded as defying the predictions of the second demographic transition and has fueled a debate over the distinctiveness of the Mediterranean model of family formation. Comparative analyses based on the Family and Fertility Survey documented the marginal role of cohabitation in Spain and in the rest of southern European countries by the mid‐1990s. In this research, the authors used more recent data from the 2006 Spanish Fertility, Family and Values Survey (N = 5,750) to reveal that cohabitation has spread significantly among younger cohorts and hence can no longer be considered as playing a marginal role in the family formation process.

U.S. Families' Adoption of Chinese Daughters: A Narrative Analysis of Family Themes in Children's Books

The purpose of this qualitative study was to examine the ways in which family formation processes were presented in international children's adoption books. Guided by Pinderhughes' (1996) adoptive family development model, we conducted a content analysis for the representation of two developmental phases (anticipation and accommodation). A total of 24 publicly accessible books (e.g., via libraries, websites, or bookstores) were coded independently by two researchers. The results indicated that adoptive developmental tasks were represented in the books. The books were transparent in the description of positively and negatively valenced events (e.g., adoptive children are withdrawn from new parents). Implications for practice and service provision and research are offered.

RACIAL ‘BOUNDARY-POLICING’

AbstractAs people who cross racial boundaries in the family formation process, the experiences of interracial couples can actually reveal the nature of racial boundaries within and across societies. I draw on in-depth qualitative interviews with eighty-seven respondents in interracial Black and White couples in Los Angeles and Rio de Janeiro to compare perceptions of public stigmatization by outsiders, a term I call “boundary-policing.” I find that couples in Los Angeles perceive gendered, Black individuals as perpetrators of this boundary-policing. In Rio de Janeiro, couples perceive regionalized and classed, White perpetrators. These findings suggest that in the United States and Brazil, racial boundaries are intertwined with class and gender boundaries to shape negotiation of boundary-policing in the two contexts. This analysis builds on previous studies of ethnoracial boundaries by showing how individuals reinforce and negotiate them through interpersonal relations. It demonstrates the similarities and differences in the negotiation and reinforcement of racial boundaries in the two sites.