The Diffusion of Cohabitation and Children\u27s Risks of Family Dissolution

Poster Presentation Families headed by a cohabiting couple are often found to be less stable than those headed by a married couple. There is however much transnational diversity regarding the size of the stability gap between the two union forms. We make use of the enormous internal heterogeneity of union behaviour in Canada to explore in detail a hypothesis stating that the more cohabitation is common within a society, the more cohabiting unions are stable. Taking the point of view of children, we analyze the hazards of parental separation for children born to cohabiting or married parents between 1983 and 2008. To better represent the normative environment in which families live, we define both geographically- and culturally-based contextual units. We use individual-level data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Children and Youth as well as contextual-level data from national censuses. The results of our multilevel models suggest that cohabiting families do indeed become more stable with increasing diffusion of cohabitation but that the evolution of the marriage/cohabitation stability gap might not be linear. Moreover, the diffusion process accounts for about half of the contextual-level variance of the hazards of parental separation and other explanatory processes must thus be investigated