Towards a Geography of Unmarried Cohabitation in the Americas

Abstract

BACKGROUND In the context of increasing cohabitation and growing demand for understanding the driving forces behind the cohabitation boom, most analyses have been carried out at a national level, not accounting for regional heterogeneity within countries. OBJECTIVE This paper presents the geography of unmarried cohabitation in the Americas. We offer a large-scale, cross-national perspective together with small-area estimates of cohabitation. We decided to produce this map because: (i) geography unveils spatial heterogeneity and challenges explanatory frameworks that may work at the international level but have low explanatory power in regard to intra-national variation. (ii) we argue that historical pockets of cohabitation can still be identified by examining the current geography of cohabitation. (iii) our map is a first step toward understanding whether the recent increase in cohabitation is an intensification of pre-existing traditions or whether it has different roots that also imply a new geography. METHODS Census microdata from 39 countries and 19,000 local units have been pulled together to map the prevalence of cohabitation among women. RESULTS The results show inter- and intra-national regional contrasts. The highest rates of cohabitation are found in areas of Central America, the Caribbean, Colombia and Peru. The lowest rates are mainly found in the United States and Mexico. In all countries the spatial autocorrelation statistics indicates substantial spatial heterogeneity. CONCLUSIONS Our results raise the question as to which forces have shaped these patterns and remind us that such forces need to be taken into account to understand recent patterns, particularly increases, in cohabitation.

Marriage and divorce of immigrants and descendants of immigrants in Sweden

“…There is very little international comparative data on marriage and divorce that we can rely on in our assessment, 6 but the demographic and ethnographic literature provides helpful guidance. For example, the literature on Latin America tells of relatively weak families and low levels of formal marriage formation (e.g., López-Gay et al 2014), while that on Africa tells of often complex and dynamic patterns of marriage formation and marital turnover (e.g., Lesthaeghe, Kaufmann, and Meekers 1989;Tabutin and Schoumaker 2004). The Arab world has historically been characterized by high levels of marital turnover, with high rates of marriage formation, 6 The United Nations provide crude statistics on the estimated fractions of the population in member countries that belong to different civil-status categories and, in some cases, on crude demographic rates of nuptial behavior (e.g., United Nations Statistics Division 2012).…”

Cohabitation and Marriage: Complexity and Diversity in Union‐Formation Patterns

“…Informal unions—cohabitation or consensual unions—are increasing in prevalence, even in countries where they were once uncommon. Cohabitation is widespread across Europe (Klüsener, Perelli‐Harris, & Sánchez Gassen, ), in North America (Lopez‐Gay et al, ), and Australia (Thomson, Lappegård, Carlson, Evans, & Gray, ). In more traditional European countries such as Spain and Italy, cohabitation has become an increasingly common pathway to family formation (Dominguez‐Folgueras & Castro‐Martin, ; Gabrielli & Hoem, ).…”

Change and continuity in the fertility of unpartnered women in Latin America, 1980–2010

“…In fact, since the turn of the century, more children are born outside marriage than within (Castro-Martín et al 2011). Furthermore, recent research shows that in Latin America, as in other world regions, there has been a recent cohabitation boom (Esteve, Lesthaeghe, and López-Gay 2012;López-Gay et al 2014;Esteve and Lesthaeghe 2016) and that consensual unions are no longer atypical among the middle and upper classes (Laplante et al 2015). As in several European countries (Toulemon and Testa 2005), the probability of having a child is practically the same for cohabiting and married couples in Latin America (Laplante et al 2015).…”