The Development of Cohabiting Fertility and its Underlying Educational Gradient. A Comparative Perspective across Countries (PDF)

Seminar paper from the year 2016 in the subject Sociology - Gender Studies, grade: 2,3, University of Cologne, language: English, abstract: This paper deals with the topic of cohabiting fertility and its underlying educational gradient. My aim is to analyse, how cohabiting fertility has developed among women with different educational levels in various European countries and the USA. This topic is of major importance, because over the past decades, starting in the 1970s, there has been a huge increase not just in cohabitation, but also in cohabiting fertility across Europe and the USA.

Nevertheless, differences between countries persisted, displaying only a marginal increase and importance of cohabitation in family formation for some countries. Especially in South European countries like Spain and Italy, but also in Russia and Poland, the share of births within cohabitation remains low. In 2004, births within cohabitation only accounted for 10 percent of all births in Italy and 18 percent in Russia. In contrast Norway and France experienced a huge increase in cohabiting births accounting for over 50 percent of all births in 2004 (Perelli-Harris 2010). But even in these countries, fertility within cohabitation did not spread uniformly, showing a leading role for the Northern communities in Norway (Vitali et al. 2015), indicating that variation in cohabitation even exists within countries.

The main theory explaining the societal diffusion of both, cohabitation and childbearing within cohabitation, is the Second Demographic Transition (SDT). According to the SDT, there is a close connection with the ideational value change, leading to a greater social acceptance of behaviours like unmarried cohabitation, non-marital childbearing and divorce. Consequently, the SDT assumes cohabiting births to be more common among higher educated people, because these are ex-pected to break with old traditions and function as forerunners (Perelli-Harris et al. 2010).