A Cooperative Analysis of Union Formation

本研究以美国、加拿大、瑞典、意大利为研究对象，对近30年来男女结婚同居的影响因素进行了比较研究。它将分析入学率，教育程度，劳动力参与，劳动力经验，妇女和男子的收入潜力，以及怀孕和/或子女的存在对工会形成的影响。这项研究将确定替代性结合形式（同居和婚姻）的出现，沿着男子和妇女生活的变化，如何改变了不同群体和国家之间的传统结合模式。这项研究将使用1993年至1995年期间这些国家“生育率和家庭调查”新提供的比较数据。将采用事件历史分析，将同居和婚姻视为相互竞争的替代结果，在个人和社会制度层面测量固定和随时间变化的自变量。这项研究将有助于更清楚地了解家庭生活中这种转变的可能轨迹。一个关键的理论问题是，妇女和男子的生活史中的组成变化如何给婚姻的形成带来影响，妇女和男子（绝对的和相对的）群体特定的角色和潜力，以及婚姻形成过程中的变化如何促成家庭生活的这种变化。为了更好地理解婚姻作为一种制度，一个重要的关切是该项目分析婚姻的决定因素如何随着同居作为一种替代性结合形式的增加而发生变化。这项研究具有政策意义，因为儿童（已出生或即将出生的儿童）在结合过程中的作用不断变化，这对家庭中父亲或父亲角色的存在以及家庭经济福祉和福利依赖性意味着什么。

The proposed research is a comparative study of the factors influencing women's and men's entry into marriage and cohabitation over the past 30 years in the United States, Canada, Sweden, and Italy. It will analyze the effects of school enrollment, educational attainment, labor force participation, labor force experience, the earnings potential of women and men, and the occurrence of pregnancy and/or the presence of children on union formation. The study will determine how the availability of alternative forms of union (cohabitation and marriage), along with shifts in the lives of men and women, have altered traditional patterns of union formation across cohorts and among nations. The study will use newly available comparative data from the "Fertility and Family Surveys" of these nations between 1993 and 1995. Event history analyses will be employed, treating cohabitation and marriage as competing alternative outcomes, with fixed and time-varying independent variables measured at the individual and social institutional level. This research will contribute to a clearer understanding of the likely trajectory of this transformation in family life. A key theoretical concern is how compositional changes in the life histories women and men bring to union formation, on the cohort-specific roles and potentialities of women and men (absolutely and relative to each other), and changes in the process of union formation have contributed to this change in family life. An important concern for better understanding marriage as an institution is the project's analysis of how the determinants of marriage have changed with the rise in cohabitation, as an alternative union type. The research is of policy concern because of the changing role of children (already born or impending births) in the union formation process, and what this implies for the presence of a father or father-figure in the households and for family economic well-being and welfare dependence.