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Family Matters:
Three Essays on Living Arrangements across Societies
Doctoral Thesis submitted for the degree of
Doctor of Demography
Family Matters:
Three Essays on Living Arrangements across Societies
Author
Chia Liu
Director Dr. Albert Esteve Palós Tutor Dr. Juan Antonio Módenes Cabrerizo UNIVERSITAT AUTÒNOMA DE BARCELONA DEPARTAMENT DE GEOGRAFIA CENTRE D’ESTUDIS DEMOGRÀFICS April 2017
ii I thank my family for their support throughout the years, especially my brother Ted, who had given me two laptops and picked up the tab for numerous meals and trips during my graduate school years. Some say that siblings are the ones who travel along the path of life with you longer than anyone else, more so than a parent (first 2/3) and a spouse (with any lucky, 2/3 of one’s life span). Add “sister” to the list of unavoidable things in life along with death and taxes. My grandparents in Fresno are the soul of the family. My in-laws in Barcelona have made a home away from home for me. Most of all, I want to thank Marçal Capdevila, who embodies all the qualities of the most supportive companion, whose contribution to my life in the past 3-4 years includes but are not limited to: listening to countless intolerable versions of my presentations so I could be tolerable to others, attributing every miniscule success I’ve ever achieved to my personal merit, gently writing off all of the more substantial failures I’ve ever experienced as the inevitability of circumstances, and simply being the person who I can´t wait to go home and tell all big and small stories to.
iii PREFACE This work is comprised of a collection of three essays, centered on the topic of family coresidence with a cross-national perspective, showing change over time. Each paper had been shaped and molded by the various opportunities and inspirations that presented themselves along my research journey. Although all three essays stem from the same central theme of family demography, each essay uses entirely distinct theoretical frameworks on different populations. Together, they seek to answer the questions: Under what circumstances do family members live with one another today? What are the implications of social and demographic change on family life and living arrangements? How do these implications vary in form and pace of change across societies? The first essay, “Family and household composition in Asia” was a work funded by the European Research Council grant (ERC- 2009 - StG-240978) awarded to the research project, “Towards a Unified Analysis of World Population: Family Patterns in Multilevel Perspective” a.k.a. WORLDFAM, led by Dr. Albert Esteve of the Center for Demographic Studies. It will be published in chapter form in the Routledge Handbook of Asian Demography, edited by Zhongwei Zhao and Adrian C. Hayes. This particular work, exploratory in nature, relies heavily on descriptive statistics from large datasets of various sources and focuses mainly on family coresidential patterns in 12 Asian countries and changes over time. Since other chapters of the Routledge handbook cover topics such as changing marriage patterns and fertility decline in the recent years in Asia, we concentrate our analysis on intergenerational coresidence as a form of old age support, a salient demographic feature in many Asian countries. One of the most challenging tasks in writing this essay is the range of data needed. Countries such as Afghanistan have very little published demographic data, and countries such as China exert strict control over the access of their official data. The Integrated Public-Use Microdata Series International (IPUMS-i) encompassed an extensive collection of census samples from most of the Asian countries of interest, but to fill in the missing pieces, we needed to add a few other data sources. Luxembourg Income Studies, Demographic Health Surveys, United Nations data, and aggregate data from several national statistical offices, were also used to enrich and geographically expand our analysis. With the help of Dr. Hyun Ok Lee of Yonsei University, I was also able to add an interesting case, South Korea, to this chapter. The use of microdata from South Korean censuses from 1980 to 2010 illuminates rapid family changes that are occurring alongside economic progress as South Korea
v A large portion of the revision phase of the second chapter and the writing phase of the third chapter was completed under the supervision and guidance of Dr. Ann Berrington during my research stay at the Centre for Population Change (CPC) of the University of Southampton. I received invaluable suggestions and comments on the topics of principle component analysis from Dr. Amos Channon, migration from Dr. Jakub Bijak, family and marriage from Dr. Brienna Perelli-Harris, Dr. Agnese Vitali and Dr. Jennifer Holland, all of which strengthened the methodological and theoretical framework employed by this dissertation. During my short unofficial stay at the Department of Sociology at the University of Surrey, I benefited from meeting with one of the editors of Ethnic and Racial Studies , Dr. Victoria Redclift, who helped me further develop on the idea of migrant generational changes. Along with my supervisor Dr. Esteve and our co-author Dr. Treviño, the essay was further streamlined and shaped into the manuscript that it is today. We aim to submit this manuscript for publication by the time of my thesis defense. The motivation to explore, update, and challenge current knowledge on living arrangements across the world inspired the conception of this thesis. Due to various funding and other practical concerns, the three essays vary in themes and geography. The first chapter examines Asia, the second Latin America, and the third Spain and Morocco. But, regardless of diversity, some general truths about how humans arrange themselves into households can still be extracted from the three case studies. The wide range of topics facilitates a multi-dimensional and comprehensive look at family life both through a household perspective and a person-centered perspective.
vi
- Family Matters: Introduction Table of Contents
- About Data
- Main Themes
- Intergenerational Coresidence
- Female Headship
- Living Arrangement of Migrants
- Changes through Time and Space
- Chapter 1: Family and Household Composition in Asia
- Introduction
- Background
- Data
- Household Perspective
- Individual Perspective
- Living Alone
- Living with Parents
- Living with a Spouse
- Living with Children
- Conclusions
- Chapter 2: Female-headed Households and Living Conditions in Latin America
- Introduction
- Background
- Female Headship and Changing Patterns in Union Formation viii
- Female Headship and Living Conditions
- Data and Methodology
- Identification of Household Heads
- Categorization of Union Statuses
- Measurement of Living Conditions
- Results
- Evolution and Decomposition of Female Headship by Union Status
- Living Conditions by Sex of the Household Head
- Conclusions
- Moroccans in Spain Chapter 3: Living Arrangements of Migrants by Gender, Generation, and Time: The Case of
- Introduction
- Background
- Moroccan Migration in Spain
- Living Arrangements of Moroccan Migrants as a Proxy of Family Dynamics
- Data and Methodology
- Results
- Descriptive Findings
- Logistic Regression
- Origin, Migrant Generation and Time Dimensions...................................................................
- Conclusions
- Family Matters: Conclusions
- Summary of Findings
- Chapter 1: Family and household composition in Asia.............................................................
ix Chapter 2: Female-headed households and living conditions in Latin America ....................... 96 Chapter 3: Living arrangements of migrants by gender, generation, and time: The case of Moroccans in Spain ................................................................................................................... 97 Discussion ..................................................................................................................................... 97 Limitations .................................................................................................................................. 102 References ...................................................................................................................................... 103
FAMILY MATTERS: INTRODUCTION 1 FAMILY MATTERS: INTRODUCTION Family as an institution has historically governed human sexuality, social activities, resource allocation, and emotional affiliation. Through union formation and childbearing, the establishment of one’s own nuclear family is often thought of as the grand entrance into adulthood, or a rite of passage which entails new sets of responsibilities. Like a living, breathing organism, family dynamics are rarely static. With the passage of time, the roles of care-provider and care-receiver may reverse, members may join or drop out due to union formation, dissolution, birth or death, and the intensity of influence from one member to another may strengthen or weaken. The pace, prevalence, and timing of each event differ across time, societies, and social strata. The question, “What constitutes a family?” has been scrutinized by family sociologists and demographers who wonder whether it is love and affection, religious sanction, personal support, government licensure, community endorsement, or a combination of the above (Thornton et al., 2007) that serves as the essential building blocks of a marriage, which in turn becomes the pillar of what we understand as family life. Across the world, both structure and belief systems of the family vary from society to society, influencing individuals to live family lives as they see fit, while guided by the ideologies of their culture, or in the form of “ideology in action” (Muncie, 1995). Beyond cultural influences, the amplification of modern life choices has also led to shifts in family models. Catherine Hakim’s preference theory pointed out five major social changes that created new options for women: the contraceptive revolution, the equal opportunities revolution, the expansion of white-collar occupations, the creation of jobs for secondary earners, and the increasing importance of attitudes, values and personal preferences in the lifestyle choices of affluent modern societies (Hakim, 2003). Bearing the increasingly dynamic opportunities for all people, especially women, we are faced with the new challenge of interpreting the ever-evolving meaning of family ties. As a response, I embarked on three separate journeys that embody the theme of understanding family life through living arrangements across time.
FAMILY MATTERS: THREE ESSAYS ON LIVING ARRANGEMENTS ACROSS SOCIETIES 2 This thesis seeks to shed light on recent developments in coresidential patterns and family structures by drawing upon three case studies of prominent family features around the world: intergenerational coresidence in Asia, female headship in Latin America, and unique family strategies for migrants, with the example of Moroccans in Spain. Each chapter shows a paradox of multi-dimensional nature of family. The first chapter wrestles with the persistence of intergenerational coresidence in many Asian countries, the second reevaluates the meaning of female headship, and the third adds migration experience into the mix of determinants of family living arrangements. All three studies heavily relied on the Integrated Public-Use Microdata Series International (Minnesota Population Center, 2015). ABOUT DATA One of the main goals of this dissertation is to compare the changes of household structures over time across multiple countries, which calls for the use of large-scale person records organized into households, such as census data samples. The Integrated Public-Use Microdata Series International (IPUMS-i), managed by the Minnesota Population Center, accounts or 614 million persons living in 82 countries across the world. The massive collection of data allows us to take a peek into the family lives of individuals with information on who lives with whom in each household. The use of IPUMS-i has several advantages. First, the microdata samples are representative of register data or censuses that were conducted on the populations of interest, thus they are methodologically reliable and offer full coverage. Second, the datasets are harmonized to allow for international comparisons. Third, cross-sectional data of different time points capture panoramic changes of population over time. Lastly, the wealth of information in censuses enables us to control for demographic characteristics of individuals and material characteristics of households. Although it does not replace longitudinal data which facilitates the establishment of causalities, it serves as a proxy for looking at the evolution of family changes one snapshot at a time, with the added benefit of its richness of information. The first chapter, “Family and household composition in Asia,” analyzes 12 Asian countries from 1980 to 2010, employed 32 samples. To expand the analysis to 13 more countries, I used aggregate data from the United Nations Development Program for Myanmar, the United Nations Population Fund for Iran, the Demographic Health Survey for Bangladesh, the Luxembourg Income Survey for China, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan, on top of any available information provided by the statistical offices of each country. The second chapter, “Female-Headed Households and Living Conditions in Latin America,” zooms in on 14 Latin American countries from 1970 to 2010, utilized a total of 50
FAMILY MATTERS: THREE ESSAYS ON LIVING ARRANGEMENTS ACROSS SOCIETIES 4 of global family convergence was incorrect, and in some ways, family forms even diversified within nation-states. Notwithstanding, Goode’s assertion that the Western conjugal ideology would spread broadly has been widely confirmed and supported by evidence. In the case of Asia, although simplification of household has taken place along with economic development in certain countries, patriarchal elements of the yesteryear by and large persist and show few signs of tapering (Chu et al., 2011). Up to a certain age, almost all children live exclusively with at least one of their own biological or adoptive parents. Once the child grows up, the timing of when and if he or she ever leaves home, becomes of interest to family sociologists and demographers for their social and economic impact on the society at large. Although whether intergenerational coresidence of adult children with their parents facilitates more so the needs of the adult children or the needs of the senior parents may prove to be more of a two-way street then one (Smits, et al., 2010; Dykstra, 2010), studies on intergenerational coresidence often splinters into either targeting dependent adult children or dependent elderly parents. Studies on dependent adult children tend to focus on how housing, welfare, or economic conditions influence the children’s transition into adulthood (Berrington et al., 2009; Buchmann & Kriesi, 2011; Cobb-Clark, 2008) and cultural factors or social norms that influence the timing of leaving home (Billari & Liefbroer, 2007; Giuliano, 2007). In this paradigm, employment, union formation, and fertility of propsects and propensity of children are often scrutinized. Literature on dependent parents heavily center on the coresidence of elderly individuals living with adult children as a form of old- age care (Hermalin, 2002; Ruggles & Heggeness, 2008; Takagi, et al., 2007; Korinek, et al., 2011). In countries with limited government-sponsored elderly care provisions, the examination of this particular form of intergenerational coresidence is crucial when considering the well-being of older adults. With the increase of life expectancy and the decrease of birth rate in developed nations, a rising aged dependency ratio entails that a growing number of countries now face the challenge of long-term care for senior citizens with a shrinking work force. Population ageing is certainly not an issue that concerns only Asia. However, many European countries have adequate pension systems and social programs firmly in place to allow some level of senior independence, and perhaps solo residence. Up to 39% of Danish and 35% Dutch seniors 60+ live alone in 1994, compared to a mere 7.3% in Indonesia in 1997, as reported by the United Nations (2005). In comparison, most Asian countries are still unprepared for the impending dilemma of having too few adult children to support too many seniors while well-functioning pension systems are not yet in place (Park, 201 2 ).
FAMILY MATTERS: INTRODUCTION 5 The first chapter highlights the importance of coresidence as a form of support for aging parents in Asia, a region with high levels of intergenerational coresidence (United Nations, 2005). Intergenerational coresidence can be partially explained by filial obligations as part of family values deeply entrenched in many Asian countries, particularly in countries with strong Confucian influences such as China, Japan, or Taiwan. Moreover, demographic, economic and social and welfare realities also play a role in whether an elderly person is able to live alone and remain self-sufficient. The main goals of Chapter 1 are to examine patterns and trends in living arrangements in Asian countries, and to observe whether family systems vary geographically, and whether the simplification of household occurs alongside economic growth and development. The takeaway of this chapter serves as the building block of future studies aimed to inform policies related to old age care in the most populous region of the world.
FEMALE HEADSHIP
Household headship is an aspect of living arrangements that can reveal the economic and social dynamic within each household. Although the definition of “household head” varies from country to country and changes over time, the general assumption is that the household head is the person mainly responsible for the economic well-being of the household (Chant, 1997; Kishor & Neitzel, 1996). Most studies conducted on household headship center on the theme of gender, specifically, female headship. Female-headed households are also known as “female-maintained” or “female-supported” households (Chant, 1997). The traditional narrative of female headship tells the story of single mothers raising children with limited male assistance, whereas in modern reality female headship occurs under a plethora of circumstances. In Latin America, the phenomenon of high female headship rate has been widespread across the continent for decades (Socolow, 2000). The region has not only experienced a rise in cohabitation, but the spread of non-traditional households has reached even the higher strata of the societies, as predicted by the second demographic transition (Esteve & Lesthaeghe, 2016; LaPlante, et al., 2015; Lesthaeghe, 2014). Following the educational expansion and increase of labor force participation of women, the context of female-headed households has been furtively changing along with evolving gender dynamics. The question of whether or not being a female household head bears the same meaning it did a few decades ago remains largely unexplored. The relationship between female-headed households and the feminization of poverty has inspired vigorous debates (Alvarado Merino & Lara, 2016; Chant, 2003; Damián, 2003; Klasen et al., 2015). Scholars have long contended that female-headed households are particularly vulnerable to economic
