Partnership and fertility trajectories of immigrants and descendants in the United Kingdom: a multilevel multistate event history approach

Publication type

Journal Article

Authors

Publication date

June 1, 2023

Summary:

We study the interrelationships between partnership and fertility trajectories of immigrant women and female descendants of immigrants using the UK Household Longitudinal Study. We propose a novel multistate event history approach to analyse the outcomes of unpartnered, cohabiting, and married women. We find that the partnership and fertility behaviours of immigrants and descendants from European and Western countries are similar to those of native women: many cohabit first and then have children and/or marry. Those from countries with conservative family behaviours (e.g. South Asian countries) marry first and then have children. Women from the Caribbean show the weakest link between partnership changes and fertility: some have births outside unions; some form a union and have children thereafter. Family patterns have remained relatively stable across migrant generations and birth cohorts, although marriage is being postponed in all groups. Our findings on immigrants support the socialization hypothesis, whereas those on descendants are in line with the minority subculture hypothesis.

Published in

Population Studies

Volume and page numbers

Volume: 77 , p.359 -378

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1080/00324728.2022.2144639

ISSN

324728

Subjects

Notes

Open Access

© 2022 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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