Reconsidering the Northwest European Family System: Living Arrangements of the Aged in Comparative Historical Perspective

Abstract

During the past four decades, historians and demographers have argued that historical Northwest Europe and North America had a unique weak-family system characterized by neolocal marriage and nuclear family structure. This analysis uses newly available micro-data from 84 historical and contemporary censuses of 34 countries to evaluate whether the residential behavior of the aged in historical Northwest Europe and North America was truly distinctive. The results show that with simple controls for agricultural employment and demographic structure, comparable measures of the living arrangements of the aged show little systematic difference between nineteenth-century Northwest Europe and North America and twentieth-century developing countries. These findings cast doubt on the hypothesis that Northwest Europeans and North Americans had an exceptional historical pattern of preference for nuclear families. Copyright (c) 2009 The Population Council, Inc..

Long‐Term Effects of the Demographic Transition on Family and Kinship Networks in Britain

“…microsimulation is the principal method used to investigate long-term kinship patterns in demographic studies (wachter 1987, 1997ruggles 1987;wolf 1994;reher 1997;Hammel 2005). 1 in this application, an initial population of 40,000 with the population distribution of england in 1751 obtained from wrigley and Schofield (1981, table a.3.1) is modeled up to 2010. this population (excluding migration, although the demographic rates used here include overseas-born people) is subject to appropriate rates of fertility, mortality, and nuptiality (including divorce from 1850 and cohabitation from 1950) for the period since 1751. over time, a full set of kinship links is constructed as the individuals marry, procreate, and die, so that any kinship relationship through blood or partnership (married or cohabiting) may be traced through living and/or dead kin.…”

Coresidence with a child and happiness among older widows in Europe: Does gender of the child matter?

“…These regional differences in living arrangements have been linked to long‐term historical influences (Hajnal, 1965; Reher, 1998; Murphy, 2008), socioeconomic conditions (Ruggles, 2009), and welfare regimes (Esping‐Anderson, 1990; Glaser et al, 2004). All of these may also underlie, and interact with, patterns of intergenerational support beyond, as well as within, households.…”

Economic development and family structure: From pater familias to the nuclear family

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“…The role of cultural factors is still disputed. The accepted wisdom is that they might play a role in influencing the rapidity and the intensity of the process, but do not seem crucial determinants of the process itself (Ruggles (2009)). …”

“…According to Ruggles (2007), the decline of intergenerational coresidence reflects a decline of patriarchal control. Patriarchal control was widely diffused in pre-modern societies.…”