Housing Affordability, Housing Tenure Status and Household Density: Are Housing Characteristics Associated with Union Di
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Housing Affordability, Housing Tenure Status and Household Density: Are Housing Characteristics Associated with Union Dissolution? Sandra Krapf1 · Michael Wagner2 Received: 12 February 2019 / Accepted: 4 December 2019 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract Housing is an important dimension of social inequality between couples, but it has been largely ignored in prior research on union dissolution. Extending the literature that controlled for the stabilizing effect of homeownership, we investigate whether housing, measured as household density, housing tenure and housing affordability, is related to the risk of union dissolution. Based on data from the German Family Panel (pairfam), we analyze 3441 coresidential partnerships. We run discrete-time event-history models to assess the risk of separation within a time frame of 7 years. Housing affordability is found to be negatively related to the risk of union dissolution among couples, as those couples with a high residual income (i.e., household income after deducting housing costs) were less likely to separate than those with a lower residual income. By contrast, household density is found to be unrelated to separation. In line with previous research, our findings indicate that homeowners had more stable relationships than tenants. The analysis shows that this was the case regardless of whether the home was jointly owned or was owned by one partner only. Keywords Housing cost · Household crowding · Homeownership · Separation · Socioeconomic · Situation
* Sandra Krapf [email protected]‑mannheim.de Michael Wagner [email protected]‑koeln.de 1
Mannheim Center for European Social Research, University of Mannheim, 68159 Mannheim, Germany
2
Institute of Sociology and Social Psychology, University of Cologne, Albertus‑Magnus‑Platz, 50923 Cologne, Germany
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S. Krapf, M. Wagner
1 Introduction Partnership dissolution is a widespread phenomenon in advanced societies. Such breakups can have negative consequences for both the partners (Andreß and Bröckel 2007; Kalmijn 2010) and their children (Amato and James 2010). Therefore, it is important to understand whether the risk of separating is unequally distributed across specific socioeconomic groups. The existing empirical evidence has, however, been inconclusive (Lyngstad and Jalovaara 2010; Killewald 2016; Wagner and Weiß 2003). In this paper, we focus on an important dimension of the socioeconomic situations of couples, namely their housing conditions. Given the social stratification of housing outcomes (Kurz and Blossfeld 2004; Dewilde and De Decker 2016; Zavisca and Gerber 2016) and the centrality of housing for couples’ everyday lives, it seems surprising that, apart from studies that include homeownership as a control variable in statistical models, there has been little research explicitly focusing on the association between housing conditions and relationship stability. We investigate to what extent housing tenure (with joint and sole homeownership as distinct categories), housing affordabili
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