Early Family Life Course Standardization in Sweden: The Role of Compositional Change
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Early Family Life Course Standardization in Sweden: The Role of Compositional Change Zachary Van Winkle1 Received: 22 December 2017 / Accepted: 10 December 2019 © The Author(s) 2020
Abstract The diversity of early family life courses is thought to have increased, although empirical evidence is mixed. Less standardized family formation is attributed to compositional changes in educational attainment, labour market participation, and childhood living conditions. I investigate whether and why family trajectories have become more or less standardized across birth cohorts in Sweden. I combine sequence metrics with Oaxaca–Blinder decompositions to assess the compositional shifts that drive changes in family formation standardization. Family trajectories of individuals born in 1952, 1962, and 1972 from age 18 to 35 are reconstructed using Swedish register data. My results demonstrate that early family formation has become more standardized across birth cohorts. Further, compositional differences between birth cohorts partially account for this standardization, especially for women. For example, higher levels of educational attainment are associated with family formation standardization. This substantiates arguments that family formation may re-standardize following the second demographic transition. Keywords Family · Life course · Sequence analysis · Educational expansion · Social change
1 Introduction Many scholars have claimed that early family life courses have become more diverse across European societies starting in the mid-twentieth century (see Buchmann and Kriesi 2011). Young adults leave the parental home, marry, and enter parenthood at Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s1068 0-019-09551-y) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Zachary Van Winkle [email protected] 1
Department of Sociology and Nuffield College, University of Oxford, 42‑43 Park End Street, Oxford OX1 1DJ, UK
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later ages, and some never enter marriage or parenthood (Goldscheider 1997; Rowland 2007). Additionally, cohabitation (Heuveline and Timberlake 2004), single parenthood (Heuveline et al. 2003), divorce (Schoen and Canudas-Romo 2006), and remarriage (Coleman et al. 2000) have become more common. In sum, life course patterns tend to characterize increasingly smaller portions of populations, which results in less standardized family life courses (Brückner and Mayer 2005). It is important to study family life course de-standardization, because increasing diversity may have serious consequences for individuals and societies (see Zimmermann and Konietzka 2017 for a discussion). High life course diversity that is generated by nonmarital parenthood, serial cohabitation, and divorce is likely tightly intertwined with the production of social inequalities and their reproduction across generations (e.g. McLanahan and Percheski 2008). Further, more diverse family life courses are associa
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