Marriage and cohabitation : comparison of opinions and attitudes of young people and adult generation

The bachelor thesis called "Marriage and cohabitation: comparison of opinions and attitudes of young people and adult generation" focuses on changes of demographic behavior of the Czech population which started to appear after the Velvet revolution in 1989. One of the changes was a denial of marriage as the ultimate form of partnership, which led to the expansion of cohabitation as an alternative form of marriage. According to the normative theory and the theory of second demographic transition, these changes were caused by the turn in values. This thesis uses a combined research design and using the secondary data analysis and in- depth interviews compares opinions of the two generations on marriage and cohabitation. This thesis also tries to find the factors that affect these opinions and examines, if there is a generation transfer of the values in a family. The results show, that young people are more tolerant towards the cohabitation, which however does not necessarily mean that they also prefer this form of partnership in their own personal life. Apart from the age, the important factors are also sex, marital status and education. The interviews showed, that the marriage of young peoples' parents proves to play an important role when it comes to forming their own opinion about this topic