Emerging Trends in The Social and Behavioral Sciences

Emerging Trends: Family Formation and Gender

Item

Title

Emerging Trends: Family Formation and Gender

Author

Matysiak, Anna

Nitsche, Natalie

Research Area

Social Institutions

Topic

Marriage and the Family

Abstract

Family formation is a well‐studied topic in demography and the social sciences. Yet, open questions to be addressed by future research remain. Focusing on the childbearing side of family formation, we discuss how a gendered lens, which led researchers to concentrate on women's experiences, has shaped previous studies. We argue that future research can be advanced by (i) going beyond this perspective and addressing men and their experiences pertaining to work and family and by (ii) broadening research on couples in order to understand how his and her resources, values, and experiences interact in relating to family formation. Furthermore, we discuss (iii) the relevance of incorporating a larger array of macrolevel factors into studies on family formation, such as regulations affecting the practical and daily lives of families, or the cultural context of emotions and (iv) which methodological advances are needed to address the complexity of the studied processes.

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Identifier

etrds0406

extracted text

Emerging Trends: Family Formation
and Gender
ANNA MATYSIAK and NATALIE NITSCHE∗

Abstract
Family formation is a well-studied topic in demography and the social sciences. Yet,
open questions to be addressed by future research remain. Focusing on the childbearing side of family formation, we discuss how a gendered lens, which led researchers
to concentrate on women’s experiences, has shaped previous studies. We argue that
future research can be advanced by (i) going beyond this perspective and addressing men and their experiences pertaining to work and family and by (ii) broadening
research on couples in order to understand how his and her resources, values, and
experiences interact in relating to family formation. Furthermore, we discuss (iii) the
relevance of incorporating a larger array of macrolevel factors into studies on family
formation, such as regulations affecting the practical and daily lives of families, or
the cultural context of emotions and (iv) which methodological advances are needed
to address the complexity of the studied processes.

INTRODUCTION
Family formation is at the heart of the metabolism of human societies. Yet,
there is no clear-cut definition of the family. The UN and the US Census define
the family as a household of two or more people “related by birth, marriage
or adoption” (UN, 2015; US Census, 2015), while the OECD distinguishes
between “couple families,” including married and cohabiting couples, and
other family forms with children (OECD, 2015). Others have argued that
families are increasingly spanning over more than just one household, and
that household-based definitions miss these spatially spread family forms
(Cherlin, 2010; Teachman, Tedrow, & Crowder, 2000). Whatever the definition, this makes it obvious that family formation entails two processes, the
formation of unions among adults and the birth (or adoption) of the first and
subsequent children.
In this piece, we will reflect on the current state of demographic and sociological research on family formation and discuss areas in which we see
∗ Both

authors contributed to the paper equally and are listed in aphabetical order.

Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences.
Robert Scott and Marlis Buchmann (General Editors) with Stephen Kosslyn (Consulting Editor).
© 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ISBN 978-1-118-90077-2.

1

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

special potential for future investigation. There is a vast amount of research
on both union formation and particularly childbearing behavior, investigating current and past trends and their antecedents and consequences in many
countries and cultures across the world. We will concentrate on the literature
related to childbearing, discuss union formation only in passing, and limit
our (geographic) scope to couples and families in advanced societies.
WOMEN AND MEN
Over the last several decades, Western developed countries have witnessed
enormous changes in family-related behaviors, evidenced by a gradual
weakening of the ties between childbearing and marriage formation,
increases in cohabitation and nonmarital childbearing, postponement of
the transition to parenthood, and a general decline in total fertility rates
below replacement (Cherlin, 2010; Frejka & Sobotka, 2008). In response,
much of the empirical research in the field of the family tried to understand
the driving forces behind these changes. This research has largely focused
on women’s behaviors. It investigated why women increasingly opt for
cohabitation instead of marriage, studied transitions from cohabitation into
marriage and how these are linked with childbearing, tried to understand
why women postpone their entry into motherhood, and why they have
fewer births than in the past. For a long time, however, little attention has
been paid to men. Guided largely by the economic reasoning of the family
shaped by Becker and his collaborators (Becker, 1981; Willis, 1973), it was
assumed that men’s roles in the family were confined to breadwinning
while most important decisions regarding the family were made by women
(Greene & Biddlecom, 2000). As a result, the large majority of studies trying
to understand women’s childbearing behaviors focused on women’s own
attributes, at most “controlling” for the male partner’s characteristics such
as education or earnings.
Such an approach, however, limits our full understanding of family formation choices and behaviors, as it neglects the perspective and agency of men.
The interest among researchers in men and their family-related behaviors
started to emerge only recently. For example, researchers started to look
at how men’s education, position in the labor market, and earnings affect
partners’ conjugal and fertility choices (Blossfeld & Mills, 2010; Kalmijn,
2011) and how the rapid increase in women’s educational attainment,
now surpassing that of men in many advanced nations, affects men’s
(and women’s) opportunities to find a partner (De Hauw, Grow and Van
Bavel, 2015). Increasingly more research is conducted on trends in and
determinants of men’s involvement in the family (Cooke & Baxter, 2010;
Hook, 2006; Kan, Sullivan, & Gershuny, 2011) as well as its consequences for

Emerging Trends: Family Formation and Gender

3

continued childbearing (Bernhardt, Goldscheider, & Turunen, 2014; Brodmann, Esping-Andersen, & Guell, 2007; Cooke, 2009; Duvander, Lappegard,
& Andersson, 2010).
Yet, more research on men in the field of family formation is needed, for
example, on the question of how men perceive and experience the benefits
from and costs of forming a family. It should also inform us on how these
costs and benefits shape men’s intentions to form a union or have a (the next)
child. Previous research has found that the stability of men’s employment
and men’s earnings have strong and positive effects on family formation
(Blossfeld & Mills, 2010; Kalmijn, 2011). We know little, however, on whether
and how these effects have been changing over time and how they vary
across countries. For instance, has the positive effect of men’s labor market outcomes on men’s family formation become less positive over time? If
so, could this be linked to changes in gender relations within the couple as
women’s contributions to the household budget have been increasing and
men have become more involved in childcare? Or conversely, has the role of
men’s socio-economic resources become more important as the low educated
men with poor earnings prospects are becoming less likely to form a family
at all? Evidence for the latter development has been found for instance for
Belgium (Trimarchi & Van Bavel, 2015). What is the role of other factors for
shaping men’s family-related behaviors, that is, the desire to remain free and
uncommitted or the desire to have a certain amount of leisure time?
We also need to better understand why men remain less involved in
housework and childcare than women. The persistence of the gender
gap in housework and childcare, despite the closing gender disparities in
employment, results in work–family tensions experienced by women and
has been argued to be one of the important factors suppressing fertility
(Esping-Andersen & Billari, 2015; Goldscheider, Bernhardt, & Lappegård,
2015). Past research focused mainly on the gender gap in housework and
looked largely at the role of factors that support or inhibit women’s labor
force participation. Extending the discussion from housework to childcare
as well as extending the array of possible determinants to other areas (e.g.,
factors that inhibit men’s involvement in the family) could shed more light
on the gender disparities in involvement at home.
COUPLES
The large majority of children today are born to couples who live together
at the time of the birth of the child, either married or in cohabitation
(Perelli-Harris et al., 2012). Decision-making about whether to have a baby
thus falls in the realm of both partners, often being a joint decision of him

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

and her. This implies that studying linkages between her or his socioeconomic resources such as education or employment and childbearing
individually will likely not capture the underlying process fully, as partners
and interactive processes between them are excluded from this perspective.
Since the 1990s, a growing body of literature explicitly addressed how
interactive dynamics between partners may affect childbearing behavior.
What we know is that among couples, his and her fertility desires and
intentions both appear to matter and predict childbearing behavior of
the couple in an additive and interactive way (Testa, Cavalli, & Rosina,
2014; Thomson, McDonald, & Bumpass, 1990), and increasingly, studies
investigate the underlying decision-making mechanisms among the partners. They suggest, for example, that the relative weight of her and his
intentions on subsequent births varies by parity (Bauer and Kneip, 2014)
or that either partner appears to have a “veto” power when he or she does
not desire any further children but the partner does (Bauer & Kneip, 2013).
Furthermore, the relationship between education, occupation, or income and
childbearing behavior has been shown to vary conditional on the education
or other socioeconomic resources of the partner (Corijn, Liefbroer, & de Jong
Gierveld, 1996; Dribe & Stanfors, 2010). Studies suggest, for instance, that
homogamous highly educated couples have larger second or third birth
hazards in some European countries (Kreyenfeld, 2002; Nitsche, Matysiak,
Van Bavel, & Vignoli, 2015). Yet, there remain many open questions in the
couple-focused childbearing literature. First, the available studies cannot
tell us whether highly educated homogamous couples are less likely to
postpone childbearing or have more children in general and hence more
research that distinguishes between the timing and the actual occurrence
of events is needed. Second, future studies should investigate in greater
detail whether differences in childbearing behavior of certain combinations
of “power couples” (Dribe & Stanfors, 2010) may be due to when these
couples form their unions and have their children or due to how stable their
unions are. Third, we still know little about the underlying mechanisms
of how and why the partners’ socioeconomic resources play together in
couples’ childbearing decision-making. Additional studies are necessary to
investigate these mechanisms in greater detail. They include testing whether
certain groups of couples may differ in how much they outsource domestic
and care work, whether they are matched to a larger degree on family and
gender norm attitudes, or whether they may display systematic differences
in relationship satisfaction, conflict resolution strategies, or value consensus.
Fourth, as the focus in this literature has rather been on highly educated
couples with women who work, we still know little about whether these
couple dynamics operate differently among couples with lower levels of
resources. Fifth, not much is known on whether the relationship between

Emerging Trends: Family Formation and Gender

5

resources and childbearing behaviors and its underlying mechanisms
vary between married and cohabiting couples or between same-sex and
heterosexual couples.
METHODOLOGICAL CHALLENGES
The quantitative methods and models used in the literature on family formation up to ca. the mid-1990s offered rather alone-standing perspectives—for
example focusing on life course outcomes such as marriage or the first birth
one at a time, or life outcomes of groups of single individuals such as men or
women, usually in isolation from the social context. This has since changed:
Methods have been developed to integrate and analyze the complexity of
social processes more holistically. In the field of family formation, researchers
started to acknowledge (i) the interdependency of several parallel or sequential processes by modeling them jointly in the framework of multiprocess
models as theoretically discussed in the life-course perspective (Elder,
Johnson, & Crosnoe 2003), (ii) interdependencies between individuals or
meso-level units nested in the same social context, using multilevel models
(Billingsley & Ferrarini, 2014; Testa, 2014), and (iii) the interconnectedness of
family members, partners, or other meaningfully connected pairs or groups
of individuals using dyad models, as suggested in the linked lives paradigm
(Keizer and Schenk, 2012; Miller, Severy, & David, 2004). Increasingly,
greater effort is also being made to evaluate effects of policies on family
formation after accounting for selection of individuals into the group of
persons eligible to make use of a given policy (Rindfuss, Guilkey, Morgan, &
Kravdal, 2010). In addition, investigations of how complex individual-level
choices interact with each other to produce macrolevel phenomena have
been brought forward. While hazard models provide us with information
on which variables affect the transition of interest, they do not inform us
to what extent these variables contribute to producing population-level
phenomena. Microsimulation techniques and agent-based models were
used for this purpose (Diaz, Fent, Prskawetz & Bernardi, 2011; Rindfuss
et al., 2010; Thomson, Winkler-Dworak, Spielauer, & Prskawetz, 2012). These
methods are great achievements and have led to many new insights but they
are not without limitations. Further developments in the methodological
realm of family formation are necessary.
For instance, (i) multiprocess models helped us to better understand the
causal relations between individual’s behaviors and observe how choices
in one life sphere affect individuals’ behaviors in another sphere. This
method allows to account for selection of individuals into the population
at risk of experiencing an event (e.g., most persons who are at risk of a first
birth have formed a partnership first). It also controls for the unobserved

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

characteristics of individuals that may jointly affect individuals’ behaviors
in several life spheres, such as union formation behaviors and childbearing.
If not accounted for these characteristics will confound the observed relationships between events experienced by individuals in those life spheres.
However, multiprocess models also have certain drawbacks that seriously
limit possibilities for their application. First of all, the estimation process is
computationally very intensive and often results in convergence problems
and the time needed for estimation increases exponentially with an increase
in the number of processes studied. Second, identification of multiprocess
models usually requires repeated events and relies on the assumption that
the unobserved heterogeneity term is constant over time. More research
is thus needed in order to eliminate these shortcomings. One step in this
direction can be the use of Bayesian estimation techniques such as MCMC
(Markov chain Monte Carlo), as it was proposed by Gottard, Mattei, and
Vignoli (2015).
The application of multilevel models (2 and 3) allowed to account for the
interdependency of observations, which are nested in the same setting, for
example, family, household, region, or country and thus share some similar characteristics that may otherwise not be easily captured by researchers.
This approach also contributed strongly to our understanding of how the
social context affects union formation and birth transitions. So far, most of
the research concentrated on the effects of the country-specific context on
individual behaviors (Billingsley & Ferrarini, 2014; Soons & Kalmijn, 2009;
Testa, 2014). More recently, however, multilevel models have increasingly
been used to also account for interdependencies between partners in couples
individuals and to study crossover effects, that is, effects of the characteristics of one partner on fertility intentions or union satisfaction of the other
(Miller, Severy, & David, 2004, Kezier and Schenk 2012). This enables the
modeling of explicit couple-level effects while modeling interactive effects
between the partners themselves, and a wider use of this method would
tremendously enrich the couple-centered literature. More attention is, however, needed in the future applications of the multilevel models as pooling of
countries, regions, or couples introduces a great deal of between-unit (e.g.,
between-country or between-couple) variation. Decomposition of the total
effects into within-unit and between-unit effects is recommended to avoid
producing estimates that are confounded by between-unit variation in the
dependent and independent variables.
Finally, future methodological developments in the field of family formation are needed in order to disentangle between timing and quantum effects.
While some individuals may only postpone union formation or entry to parenthood, others may never experience it. A failure to distinguish between the
postponement and nonoccurrence of the event makes it difficult to conclude

Emerging Trends: Family Formation and Gender

7

whether the predictor variables considered in the models only lead to a delay
in the occurrence of the studied event or whether they prevent it from ever
occurring. For instance, event history models may tell us that highly educated women are usually more likely to postpone the first birth, but they do
not inform us whether they are also more likely to remain childless.
MACROLEVEL FACTORS: SOCIAL POLICIES AND CULTURE
OF EMOTIONS
Family formation processes are embedded in the whole of the surrounding social context. It has long been theorized and shown in empirical
applications that social structure and culture are significantly linked to
family formation behavior. Yet, it has recently been argued that culture is
much more than single social norms or institutionalized practices, namely,
that culture "is an interdependent web of meanings that is structured in
consequential ways" (Bachrach, 2014, p. 5). We follow Bachrach in arguing
that while many cultural aspects, specifically more easily measurable
components such as social policies or social norms, have already been
incorporated into family formation analysis, "the importance of culture
for demographic outcomes" (ibid.) has not been fully appreciated yet in
research on family formation and much work remains to be done in that
area. This applies both to how cultural aspects have been conceptualized,
for example, rather in single pieces (“norms,” “institutions”) than from a
more holistic perspective, as well as to missing cultural elements that may
widen our understanding of how culture shapes family formation behaviors
and how cross-national differences in family formation may come about
(Bachrach, 2014). In the following section, we discuss emerging trends in a
very specific and well-studied area of macrolevel structure, namely, social
policies. Thereafter, we will present our ideas regarding the much more
neglected cultural context of emotions.
SOCIAL POLICIES
Much attention has been paid to institutional elements such as work–family
reconciliation policies, which, at least theoretically, are designed to lower
opportunity costs of parenting and therefore expected to have an impact
on specifically childbearing behavior. Researchers looked into effects on
fertility of childcare provision, maternity, and parental leave schemes,
availability and quality of part-time employment, or workplace policies.
These studies either found conflicting evidence or only small positive effects
of reconciliation policies on fertility. Furthermore, it remained unclear
whether studied policies affected only the timing of births or the number

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

of children eventually born (Gauthier, 2007; Kalwij, 2010; Thevenon & Gauthier, 2011). It thus seems there are many other factors, largely unaddressed
in research, which affect how individuals and couples can reconcile work
and family and, in extension, impact couples’ decisions on whether to add
a/an (additional) child to their family. They include regulations affecting
matters of the practical and daily life of families, specifically those that can
contribute to turning attending to a career and child-rearing simultaneously
into a more stressful and mutually exclusive endeavor. These are, for
instance, poor commuting infrastructure, lengthening travel time between
workplace and home (Huinink & Feldhaus, 2012) or rigid regulations on
opening hours limiting access to supermarkets or services such as post
offices, health care, or extracurricular activities for children. Such rigidities
may gain in importance with increasing expectations toward parents to
invest in their children (Leigh, Pacholok, Snape, & Gauthier, 2012) and in the
“work-devotion” cultures where long working hours and devotion to paid
work are highly rewarded (Blair-Loy, 2003; Pedulla and Thebaud, 2015).
While representative data on these issues is not readily available, it can be
collected and would further advance our understanding of the impact of
institutional and macrolevel cultural factors on family formation.
THE CULTURAL CONTEXT OF EMOTIONS
Another cultural aspect, largely neglected to date in sociology and demography in general and the research on family formation in particular, is the role of
emotions, both on the individual and on the macrolevel (Massey, 2002). Emotions likely play a chief role in relationship formation and childbearing considerations of individuals and couples (Basu, 2006), given that they have been
shown to be important for other decision-making processes (Isen & Means,
1983; Loewenstein, 2000). On the individual level, emotions such as a desire
for a baby (“baby fever”) may drive the decision to try to become pregnant
(Brase & Brase, 2012). Drops in subjective well-being of parents around the
time of their first birth in Germany have for instance been shown to be predictive of a depressed second birth hazards later on (Margolis & Myrskylä,
2015). Yet, subjective emotional experiences are a largely neglected but perhaps central piece in understanding variance in childbearing behavior, both
within and between countries. We suggest that paying more attention to emotion and emotional expression and management as a cultural phenomenon
on the macro-level would be fruitful for broadening our understaning of
what drives cross-cultural differences in family formation behaviors. While
there is debate in social psychology on whether emotions are biologically
innate or socially constructed, it has been argued that subjective emotional
experiences do not develop in a vacuum but that they are influenced by

Emerging Trends: Family Formation and Gender

9

their social surroundings (Thoits, 1989; Turner, 2009). Cultures appear to have
distinct ideas of how emotions should be dealt with and can be acceptably
expressed and regulated (Bowie et al., 2013; Jenkins & Karno, 1992). We therefore think that investigating emotion-culture may hold one of the keys for a
deeper understanding of, for example, the way parents emotionally perceive
the upbringing of their first child in the social context they live in. Teaching young children emotional regulation and coping with their emotional
displays, particularly in public spaces, may be perceived as more or less
stressful to parents dependent upon the emotional culture of the society. The
emotional culture may affect how accepting and supportive others—from
grandparents, teachers, service personnel in public places to bystanders and
strangers—may react to children and emotional interactions between parents
and children. For instance, if parents perceive handling children in public
as stressful due to repeated reactions that are perceived as unfriendly and
unsupportive, they may be less inclined to progress to having an additional
child. This could be a factor in understanding variations in second birth progressions across Europe. While survey data used for demographic analysis
sometimes includes questions on the emotional states and experiences of
individuals, we do not know of any survey data providing information on
emotional culture or norms pertaining to emotional expression and regulation. Thus, we suggest that future studies and data collection should attempt
to expand on the array of possible contextual and cultural factors that may
affect work–family conflict.
CONCLUSIONS AND OUTLOOK
In this reflection on current and future relevant directions of research on family formation, we have covered a few areas in which we see specific potential
for further developments. This means that we made a deliberate selection
based on our very own interests and perceptions, and does not imply that
the areas we have not discussed at all are of less relevance. They include
topics such as the diversification of family forms, for example, homosexual
families or step-families and adoptions, network influences on family formation behaviors, and research on the biological underpinnings of and their
relevance for union formation and childbearing behaviors.
We would like to close with a comment on implicit and hidden assumptions, a comment that applies to future developments in all research areas
alike. As has been pointed out long ago, theories and approaches to empirical research in the behavioral sciences are usually built on assumptions,
and only some of those are made explicit, while others remain unsaid and
sometimes unreflected upon (Slife & Williams, 1995). We would like to
encourage ourselves and other social scientists and family demographers

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

to challenge ourselves and become more aware of and explicit about those
unreflected assumptions we have yet that likely shape our selection of
topics to study, research questions, theories, methods, and interpretations of
findings. For example, the previously pronounced concentration of family
formation research on women in both data collections and empirical studies
was likely based on the socially constructed idea that women are primarily
responsible for childbearing and child-rearing and thus need to be in the
focus of this type of research. Of course, this is not the case and the field
has been changing accordingly to increasingly include data collection and
studies on men and couple dynamics. Taking the idea of gendered “separate
spheres” as a given reality may have been overcome in family demography
in the twenty-first century. Yet we believe that thinking deeply about which
implicit assumptions are guiding our choices in the research we conduct
every day may help us to opening up new directions and perspectives in
family demography and beyond.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The work leading to this essay was supported by the European Union’s
Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007–2013) through research funding
from the European Research Council (ERC no. 284238 (EURREP) for Anna
Matysiak) and a Marie Curie Action (no. 627543 (COUPFER) for Natalie
Nitsche).
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ANNA MATYSIAK SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Anna Matysiak is a research scientist at the Wittgenstein Center, Vienna Institute of Demography (ÖAW) and an assistant professor at the Warsaw School
of Economics, Institute of Statistics and Demography. She received her PhD
in economics in 2009. Her research interests cover family dynamics and its
interrelationships with socioeconomic position of individuals, their quality
of life, gender, and the institutional context of the country. She published
mostly on the effects on the interdependencies between women’s labor force
participation and family formation/dissolution, work–family conflict, consequences of family formation on subjective well-being, and diffusion of new
family forms.
NATALIE NITSCHE SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Natalie Nitsche is a postdoctoral associate at the Wittgenstein Center, Vienna
Institute of Demography (ÖAW). She earned her PhD in sociology from Yale
University in 2014. Her research interests include family and couple dynamics such as union formation, childbearing behavior, and the division of paid
and unpaid work between partners. She is specifically interested in understanding how these family processes change over the life course and over
generations, and how they relate to educational and employment trajectories
of individuals and groups.
RELATED ESSAYS
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Ehrenreich and Marion K. Underwood
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and Cydney H. Dupree
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Patrick S. Forscher and Patricia G. Devine

Emerging Trends: Family Formation and Gender

15

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Gauthier
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Hawkes and James Coxworth
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and Maria Charles
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Huinink
Childhood (Anthropology), Karen L. Kramer
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et al.
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and Claudia Buchmann
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Mendelberg et al.
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Tetlock
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Kristen Schilt
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Social Neuroendocrine Approaches to Relationships (Sociology), Sari M. van
Anders and Peter B. Gray
Recent Demographic Trends and the Family (Sociology), Lawrence L. Wu



Emerging Trends: Family Formation
and Gender
ANNA MATYSIAK and NATALIE NITSCHE∗

Abstract
Family formation is a well-studied topic in demography and the social sciences. Yet,
open questions to be addressed by future research remain. Focusing on the childbearing side of family formation, we discuss how a gendered lens, which led researchers
to concentrate on women’s experiences, has shaped previous studies. We argue that
future research can be advanced by (i) going beyond this perspective and addressing men and their experiences pertaining to work and family and by (ii) broadening
research on couples in order to understand how his and her resources, values, and
experiences interact in relating to family formation. Furthermore, we discuss (iii) the
relevance of incorporating a larger array of macrolevel factors into studies on family
formation, such as regulations affecting the practical and daily lives of families, or
the cultural context of emotions and (iv) which methodological advances are needed
to address the complexity of the studied processes.

INTRODUCTION
Family formation is at the heart of the metabolism of human societies. Yet,
there is no clear-cut definition of the family. The UN and the US Census define
the family as a household of two or more people “related by birth, marriage
or adoption” (UN, 2015; US Census, 2015), while the OECD distinguishes
between “couple families,” including married and cohabiting couples, and
other family forms with children (OECD, 2015). Others have argued that
families are increasingly spanning over more than just one household, and
that household-based definitions miss these spatially spread family forms
(Cherlin, 2010; Teachman, Tedrow, & Crowder, 2000). Whatever the definition, this makes it obvious that family formation entails two processes, the
formation of unions among adults and the birth (or adoption) of the first and
subsequent children.
In this piece, we will reflect on the current state of demographic and sociological research on family formation and discuss areas in which we see
∗ Both

authors contributed to the paper equally and are listed in aphabetical order.

Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences.
Robert Scott and Marlis Buchmann (General Editors) with Stephen Kosslyn (Consulting Editor).
© 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ISBN 978-1-118-90077-2.

1

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

special potential for future investigation. There is a vast amount of research
on both union formation and particularly childbearing behavior, investigating current and past trends and their antecedents and consequences in many
countries and cultures across the world. We will concentrate on the literature
related to childbearing, discuss union formation only in passing, and limit
our (geographic) scope to couples and families in advanced societies.
WOMEN AND MEN
Over the last several decades, Western developed countries have witnessed
enormous changes in family-related behaviors, evidenced by a gradual
weakening of the ties between childbearing and marriage formation,
increases in cohabitation and nonmarital childbearing, postponement of
the transition to parenthood, and a general decline in total fertility rates
below replacement (Cherlin, 2010; Frejka & Sobotka, 2008). In response,
much of the empirical research in the field of the family tried to understand
the driving forces behind these changes. This research has largely focused
on women’s behaviors. It investigated why women increasingly opt for
cohabitation instead of marriage, studied transitions from cohabitation into
marriage and how these are linked with childbearing, tried to understand
why women postpone their entry into motherhood, and why they have
fewer births than in the past. For a long time, however, little attention has
been paid to men. Guided largely by the economic reasoning of the family
shaped by Becker and his collaborators (Becker, 1981; Willis, 1973), it was
assumed that men’s roles in the family were confined to breadwinning
while most important decisions regarding the family were made by women
(Greene & Biddlecom, 2000). As a result, the large majority of studies trying
to understand women’s childbearing behaviors focused on women’s own
attributes, at most “controlling” for the male partner’s characteristics such
as education or earnings.
Such an approach, however, limits our full understanding of family formation choices and behaviors, as it neglects the perspective and agency of men.
The interest among researchers in men and their family-related behaviors
started to emerge only recently. For example, researchers started to look
at how men’s education, position in the labor market, and earnings affect
partners’ conjugal and fertility choices (Blossfeld & Mills, 2010; Kalmijn,
2011) and how the rapid increase in women’s educational attainment,
now surpassing that of men in many advanced nations, affects men’s
(and women’s) opportunities to find a partner (De Hauw, Grow and Van
Bavel, 2015). Increasingly more research is conducted on trends in and
determinants of men’s involvement in the family (Cooke & Baxter, 2010;
Hook, 2006; Kan, Sullivan, & Gershuny, 2011) as well as its consequences for

Emerging Trends: Family Formation and Gender

3

continued childbearing (Bernhardt, Goldscheider, & Turunen, 2014; Brodmann, Esping-Andersen, & Guell, 2007; Cooke, 2009; Duvander, Lappegard,
& Andersson, 2010).
Yet, more research on men in the field of family formation is needed, for
example, on the question of how men perceive and experience the benefits
from and costs of forming a family. It should also inform us on how these
costs and benefits shape men’s intentions to form a union or have a (the next)
child. Previous research has found that the stability of men’s employment
and men’s earnings have strong and positive effects on family formation
(Blossfeld & Mills, 2010; Kalmijn, 2011). We know little, however, on whether
and how these effects have been changing over time and how they vary
across countries. For instance, has the positive effect of men’s labor market outcomes on men’s family formation become less positive over time? If
so, could this be linked to changes in gender relations within the couple as
women’s contributions to the household budget have been increasing and
men have become more involved in childcare? Or conversely, has the role of
men’s socio-economic resources become more important as the low educated
men with poor earnings prospects are becoming less likely to form a family
at all? Evidence for the latter development has been found for instance for
Belgium (Trimarchi & Van Bavel, 2015). What is the role of other factors for
shaping men’s family-related behaviors, that is, the desire to remain free and
uncommitted or the desire to have a certain amount of leisure time?
We also need to better understand why men remain less involved in
housework and childcare than women. The persistence of the gender
gap in housework and childcare, despite the closing gender disparities in
employment, results in work–family tensions experienced by women and
has been argued to be one of the important factors suppressing fertility
(Esping-Andersen & Billari, 2015; Goldscheider, Bernhardt, & Lappegård,
2015). Past research focused mainly on the gender gap in housework and
looked largely at the role of factors that support or inhibit women’s labor
force participation. Extending the discussion from housework to childcare
as well as extending the array of possible determinants to other areas (e.g.,
factors that inhibit men’s involvement in the family) could shed more light
on the gender disparities in involvement at home.
COUPLES
The large majority of children today are born to couples who live together
at the time of the birth of the child, either married or in cohabitation
(Perelli-Harris et al., 2012). Decision-making about whether to have a baby
thus falls in the realm of both partners, often being a joint decision of him

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

and her. This implies that studying linkages between her or his socioeconomic resources such as education or employment and childbearing
individually will likely not capture the underlying process fully, as partners
and interactive processes between them are excluded from this perspective.
Since the 1990s, a growing body of literature explicitly addressed how
interactive dynamics between partners may affect childbearing behavior.
What we know is that among couples, his and her fertility desires and
intentions both appear to matter and predict childbearing behavior of
the couple in an additive and interactive way (Testa, Cavalli, & Rosina,
2014; Thomson, McDonald, & Bumpass, 1990), and increasingly, studies
investigate the underlying decision-making mechanisms among the partners. They suggest, for example, that the relative weight of her and his
intentions on subsequent births varies by parity (Bauer and Kneip, 2014)
or that either partner appears to have a “veto” power when he or she does
not desire any further children but the partner does (Bauer & Kneip, 2013).
Furthermore, the relationship between education, occupation, or income and
childbearing behavior has been shown to vary conditional on the education
or other socioeconomic resources of the partner (Corijn, Liefbroer, & de Jong
Gierveld, 1996; Dribe & Stanfors, 2010). Studies suggest, for instance, that
homogamous highly educated couples have larger second or third birth
hazards in some European countries (Kreyenfeld, 2002; Nitsche, Matysiak,
Van Bavel, & Vignoli, 2015). Yet, there remain many open questions in the
couple-focused childbearing literature. First, the available studies cannot
tell us whether highly educated homogamous couples are less likely to
postpone childbearing or have more children in general and hence more
research that distinguishes between the timing and the actual occurrence
of events is needed. Second, future studies should investigate in greater
detail whether differences in childbearing behavior of certain combinations
of “power couples” (Dribe & Stanfors, 2010) may be due to when these
couples form their unions and have their children or due to how stable their
unions are. Third, we still know little about the underlying mechanisms
of how and why the partners’ socioeconomic resources play together in
couples’ childbearing decision-making. Additional studies are necessary to
investigate these mechanisms in greater detail. They include testing whether
certain groups of couples may differ in how much they outsource domestic
and care work, whether they are matched to a larger degree on family and
gender norm attitudes, or whether they may display systematic differences
in relationship satisfaction, conflict resolution strategies, or value consensus.
Fourth, as the focus in this literature has rather been on highly educated
couples with women who work, we still know little about whether these
couple dynamics operate differently among couples with lower levels of
resources. Fifth, not much is known on whether the relationship between

Emerging Trends: Family Formation and Gender

5

resources and childbearing behaviors and its underlying mechanisms
vary between married and cohabiting couples or between same-sex and
heterosexual couples.
METHODOLOGICAL CHALLENGES
The quantitative methods and models used in the literature on family formation up to ca. the mid-1990s offered rather alone-standing perspectives—for
example focusing on life course outcomes such as marriage or the first birth
one at a time, or life outcomes of groups of single individuals such as men or
women, usually in isolation from the social context. This has since changed:
Methods have been developed to integrate and analyze the complexity of
social processes more holistically. In the field of family formation, researchers
started to acknowledge (i) the interdependency of several parallel or sequential processes by modeling them jointly in the framework of multiprocess
models as theoretically discussed in the life-course perspective (Elder,
Johnson, & Crosnoe 2003), (ii) interdependencies between individuals or
meso-level units nested in the same social context, using multilevel models
(Billingsley & Ferrarini, 2014; Testa, 2014), and (iii) the interconnectedness of
family members, partners, or other meaningfully connected pairs or groups
of individuals using dyad models, as suggested in the linked lives paradigm
(Keizer and Schenk, 2012; Miller, Severy, & David, 2004). Increasingly,
greater effort is also being made to evaluate effects of policies on family
formation after accounting for selection of individuals into the group of
persons eligible to make use of a given policy (Rindfuss, Guilkey, Morgan, &
Kravdal, 2010). In addition, investigations of how complex individual-level
choices interact with each other to produce macrolevel phenomena have
been brought forward. While hazard models provide us with information
on which variables affect the transition of interest, they do not inform us
to what extent these variables contribute to producing population-level
phenomena. Microsimulation techniques and agent-based models were
used for this purpose (Diaz, Fent, Prskawetz & Bernardi, 2011; Rindfuss
et al., 2010; Thomson, Winkler-Dworak, Spielauer, & Prskawetz, 2012). These
methods are great achievements and have led to many new insights but they
are not without limitations. Further developments in the methodological
realm of family formation are necessary.
For instance, (i) multiprocess models helped us to better understand the
causal relations between individual’s behaviors and observe how choices
in one life sphere affect individuals’ behaviors in another sphere. This
method allows to account for selection of individuals into the population
at risk of experiencing an event (e.g., most persons who are at risk of a first
birth have formed a partnership first). It also controls for the unobserved

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

characteristics of individuals that may jointly affect individuals’ behaviors
in several life spheres, such as union formation behaviors and childbearing.
If not accounted for these characteristics will confound the observed relationships between events experienced by individuals in those life spheres.
However, multiprocess models also have certain drawbacks that seriously
limit possibilities for their application. First of all, the estimation process is
computationally very intensive and often results in convergence problems
and the time needed for estimation increases exponentially with an increase
in the number of processes studied. Second, identification of multiprocess
models usually requires repeated events and relies on the assumption that
the unobserved heterogeneity term is constant over time. More research
is thus needed in order to eliminate these shortcomings. One step in this
direction can be the use of Bayesian estimation techniques such as MCMC
(Markov chain Monte Carlo), as it was proposed by Gottard, Mattei, and
Vignoli (2015).
The application of multilevel models (2 and 3) allowed to account for the
interdependency of observations, which are nested in the same setting, for
example, family, household, region, or country and thus share some similar characteristics that may otherwise not be easily captured by researchers.
This approach also contributed strongly to our understanding of how the
social context affects union formation and birth transitions. So far, most of
the research concentrated on the effects of the country-specific context on
individual behaviors (Billingsley & Ferrarini, 2014; Soons & Kalmijn, 2009;
Testa, 2014). More recently, however, multilevel models have increasingly
been used to also account for interdependencies between partners in couples
individuals and to study crossover effects, that is, effects of the characteristics of one partner on fertility intentions or union satisfaction of the other
(Miller, Severy, & David, 2004, Kezier and Schenk 2012). This enables the
modeling of explicit couple-level effects while modeling interactive effects
between the partners themselves, and a wider use of this method would
tremendously enrich the couple-centered literature. More attention is, however, needed in the future applications of the multilevel models as pooling of
countries, regions, or couples introduces a great deal of between-unit (e.g.,
between-country or between-couple) variation. Decomposition of the total
effects into within-unit and between-unit effects is recommended to avoid
producing estimates that are confounded by between-unit variation in the
dependent and independent variables.
Finally, future methodological developments in the field of family formation are needed in order to disentangle between timing and quantum effects.
While some individuals may only postpone union formation or entry to parenthood, others may never experience it. A failure to distinguish between the
postponement and nonoccurrence of the event makes it difficult to conclude

Emerging Trends: Family Formation and Gender

7

whether the predictor variables considered in the models only lead to a delay
in the occurrence of the studied event or whether they prevent it from ever
occurring. For instance, event history models may tell us that highly educated women are usually more likely to postpone the first birth, but they do
not inform us whether they are also more likely to remain childless.
MACROLEVEL FACTORS: SOCIAL POLICIES AND CULTURE
OF EMOTIONS
Family formation processes are embedded in the whole of the surrounding social context. It has long been theorized and shown in empirical
applications that social structure and culture are significantly linked to
family formation behavior. Yet, it has recently been argued that culture is
much more than single social norms or institutionalized practices, namely,
that culture "is an interdependent web of meanings that is structured in
consequential ways" (Bachrach, 2014, p. 5). We follow Bachrach in arguing
that while many cultural aspects, specifically more easily measurable
components such as social policies or social norms, have already been
incorporated into family formation analysis, "the importance of culture
for demographic outcomes" (ibid.) has not been fully appreciated yet in
research on family formation and much work remains to be done in that
area. This applies both to how cultural aspects have been conceptualized,
for example, rather in single pieces (“norms,” “institutions”) than from a
more holistic perspective, as well as to missing cultural elements that may
widen our understanding of how culture shapes family formation behaviors
and how cross-national differences in family formation may come about
(Bachrach, 2014). In the following section, we discuss emerging trends in a
very specific and well-studied area of macrolevel structure, namely, social
policies. Thereafter, we will present our ideas regarding the much more
neglected cultural context of emotions.
SOCIAL POLICIES
Much attention has been paid to institutional elements such as work–family
reconciliation policies, which, at least theoretically, are designed to lower
opportunity costs of parenting and therefore expected to have an impact
on specifically childbearing behavior. Researchers looked into effects on
fertility of childcare provision, maternity, and parental leave schemes,
availability and quality of part-time employment, or workplace policies.
These studies either found conflicting evidence or only small positive effects
of reconciliation policies on fertility. Furthermore, it remained unclear
whether studied policies affected only the timing of births or the number

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

of children eventually born (Gauthier, 2007; Kalwij, 2010; Thevenon & Gauthier, 2011). It thus seems there are many other factors, largely unaddressed
in research, which affect how individuals and couples can reconcile work
and family and, in extension, impact couples’ decisions on whether to add
a/an (additional) child to their family. They include regulations affecting
matters of the practical and daily life of families, specifically those that can
contribute to turning attending to a career and child-rearing simultaneously
into a more stressful and mutually exclusive endeavor. These are, for
instance, poor commuting infrastructure, lengthening travel time between
workplace and home (Huinink & Feldhaus, 2012) or rigid regulations on
opening hours limiting access to supermarkets or services such as post
offices, health care, or extracurricular activities for children. Such rigidities
may gain in importance with increasing expectations toward parents to
invest in their children (Leigh, Pacholok, Snape, & Gauthier, 2012) and in the
“work-devotion” cultures where long working hours and devotion to paid
work are highly rewarded (Blair-Loy, 2003; Pedulla and Thebaud, 2015).
While representative data on these issues is not readily available, it can be
collected and would further advance our understanding of the impact of
institutional and macrolevel cultural factors on family formation.
THE CULTURAL CONTEXT OF EMOTIONS
Another cultural aspect, largely neglected to date in sociology and demography in general and the research on family formation in particular, is the role of
emotions, both on the individual and on the macrolevel (Massey, 2002). Emotions likely play a chief role in relationship formation and childbearing considerations of individuals and couples (Basu, 2006), given that they have been
shown to be important for other decision-making processes (Isen & Means,
1983; Loewenstein, 2000). On the individual level, emotions such as a desire
for a baby (“baby fever”) may drive the decision to try to become pregnant
(Brase & Brase, 2012). Drops in subjective well-being of parents around the
time of their first birth in Germany have for instance been shown to be predictive of a depressed second birth hazards later on (Margolis & Myrskylä,
2015). Yet, subjective emotional experiences are a largely neglected but perhaps central piece in understanding variance in childbearing behavior, both
within and between countries. We suggest that paying more attention to emotion and emotional expression and management as a cultural phenomenon
on the macro-level would be fruitful for broadening our understaning of
what drives cross-cultural differences in family formation behaviors. While
there is debate in social psychology on whether emotions are biologically
innate or socially constructed, it has been argued that subjective emotional
experiences do not develop in a vacuum but that they are influenced by

Emerging Trends: Family Formation and Gender

9

their social surroundings (Thoits, 1989; Turner, 2009). Cultures appear to have
distinct ideas of how emotions should be dealt with and can be acceptably
expressed and regulated (Bowie et al., 2013; Jenkins & Karno, 1992). We therefore think that investigating emotion-culture may hold one of the keys for a
deeper understanding of, for example, the way parents emotionally perceive
the upbringing of their first child in the social context they live in. Teaching young children emotional regulation and coping with their emotional
displays, particularly in public spaces, may be perceived as more or less
stressful to parents dependent upon the emotional culture of the society. The
emotional culture may affect how accepting and supportive others—from
grandparents, teachers, service personnel in public places to bystanders and
strangers—may react to children and emotional interactions between parents
and children. For instance, if parents perceive handling children in public
as stressful due to repeated reactions that are perceived as unfriendly and
unsupportive, they may be less inclined to progress to having an additional
child. This could be a factor in understanding variations in second birth progressions across Europe. While survey data used for demographic analysis
sometimes includes questions on the emotional states and experiences of
individuals, we do not know of any survey data providing information on
emotional culture or norms pertaining to emotional expression and regulation. Thus, we suggest that future studies and data collection should attempt
to expand on the array of possible contextual and cultural factors that may
affect work–family conflict.
CONCLUSIONS AND OUTLOOK
In this reflection on current and future relevant directions of research on family formation, we have covered a few areas in which we see specific potential
for further developments. This means that we made a deliberate selection
based on our very own interests and perceptions, and does not imply that
the areas we have not discussed at all are of less relevance. They include
topics such as the diversification of family forms, for example, homosexual
families or step-families and adoptions, network influences on family formation behaviors, and research on the biological underpinnings of and their
relevance for union formation and childbearing behaviors.
We would like to close with a comment on implicit and hidden assumptions, a comment that applies to future developments in all research areas
alike. As has been pointed out long ago, theories and approaches to empirical research in the behavioral sciences are usually built on assumptions,
and only some of those are made explicit, while others remain unsaid and
sometimes unreflected upon (Slife & Williams, 1995). We would like to
encourage ourselves and other social scientists and family demographers

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

to challenge ourselves and become more aware of and explicit about those
unreflected assumptions we have yet that likely shape our selection of
topics to study, research questions, theories, methods, and interpretations of
findings. For example, the previously pronounced concentration of family
formation research on women in both data collections and empirical studies
was likely based on the socially constructed idea that women are primarily
responsible for childbearing and child-rearing and thus need to be in the
focus of this type of research. Of course, this is not the case and the field
has been changing accordingly to increasingly include data collection and
studies on men and couple dynamics. Taking the idea of gendered “separate
spheres” as a given reality may have been overcome in family demography
in the twenty-first century. Yet we believe that thinking deeply about which
implicit assumptions are guiding our choices in the research we conduct
every day may help us to opening up new directions and perspectives in
family demography and beyond.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The work leading to this essay was supported by the European Union’s
Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007–2013) through research funding
from the European Research Council (ERC no. 284238 (EURREP) for Anna
Matysiak) and a Marie Curie Action (no. 627543 (COUPFER) for Natalie
Nitsche).
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ANNA MATYSIAK SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Anna Matysiak is a research scientist at the Wittgenstein Center, Vienna Institute of Demography (ÖAW) and an assistant professor at the Warsaw School
of Economics, Institute of Statistics and Demography. She received her PhD
in economics in 2009. Her research interests cover family dynamics and its
interrelationships with socioeconomic position of individuals, their quality
of life, gender, and the institutional context of the country. She published
mostly on the effects on the interdependencies between women’s labor force
participation and family formation/dissolution, work–family conflict, consequences of family formation on subjective well-being, and diffusion of new
family forms.
NATALIE NITSCHE SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Natalie Nitsche is a postdoctoral associate at the Wittgenstein Center, Vienna
Institute of Demography (ÖAW). She earned her PhD in sociology from Yale
University in 2014. Her research interests include family and couple dynamics such as union formation, childbearing behavior, and the division of paid
and unpaid work between partners. She is specifically interested in understanding how these family processes change over the life course and over
generations, and how they relate to educational and employment trajectories
of individuals and groups.
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Emerging Trends: Family Formation and Gender

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Emerging Trends: Family Formation
and Gender
ANNA MATYSIAK and NATALIE NITSCHE∗

Abstract
Family formation is a well-studied topic in demography and the social sciences. Yet,
open questions to be addressed by future research remain. Focusing on the childbearing side of family formation, we discuss how a gendered lens, which led researchers
to concentrate on women’s experiences, has shaped previous studies. We argue that
future research can be advanced by (i) going beyond this perspective and addressing men and their experiences pertaining to work and family and by (ii) broadening
research on couples in order to understand how his and her resources, values, and
experiences interact in relating to family formation. Furthermore, we discuss (iii) the
relevance of incorporating a larger array of macrolevel factors into studies on family
formation, such as regulations affecting the practical and daily lives of families, or
the cultural context of emotions and (iv) which methodological advances are needed
to address the complexity of the studied processes.

INTRODUCTION
Family formation is at the heart of the metabolism of human societies. Yet,
there is no clear-cut definition of the family. The UN and the US Census define
the family as a household of two or more people “related by birth, marriage
or adoption” (UN, 2015; US Census, 2015), while the OECD distinguishes
between “couple families,” including married and cohabiting couples, and
other family forms with children (OECD, 2015). Others have argued that
families are increasingly spanning over more than just one household, and
that household-based definitions miss these spatially spread family forms
(Cherlin, 2010; Teachman, Tedrow, & Crowder, 2000). Whatever the definition, this makes it obvious that family formation entails two processes, the
formation of unions among adults and the birth (or adoption) of the first and
subsequent children.
In this piece, we will reflect on the current state of demographic and sociological research on family formation and discuss areas in which we see
∗ Both

authors contributed to the paper equally and are listed in aphabetical order.

Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences.
Robert Scott and Marlis Buchmann (General Editors) with Stephen Kosslyn (Consulting Editor).
© 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ISBN 978-1-118-90077-2.

1

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

special potential for future investigation. There is a vast amount of research
on both union formation and particularly childbearing behavior, investigating current and past trends and their antecedents and consequences in many
countries and cultures across the world. We will concentrate on the literature
related to childbearing, discuss union formation only in passing, and limit
our (geographic) scope to couples and families in advanced societies.
WOMEN AND MEN
Over the last several decades, Western developed countries have witnessed
enormous changes in family-related behaviors, evidenced by a gradual
weakening of the ties between childbearing and marriage formation,
increases in cohabitation and nonmarital childbearing, postponement of
the transition to parenthood, and a general decline in total fertility rates
below replacement (Cherlin, 2010; Frejka & Sobotka, 2008). In response,
much of the empirical research in the field of the family tried to understand
the driving forces behind these changes. This research has largely focused
on women’s behaviors. It investigated why women increasingly opt for
cohabitation instead of marriage, studied transitions from cohabitation into
marriage and how these are linked with childbearing, tried to understand
why women postpone their entry into motherhood, and why they have
fewer births than in the past. For a long time, however, little attention has
been paid to men. Guided largely by the economic reasoning of the family
shaped by Becker and his collaborators (Becker, 1981; Willis, 1973), it was
assumed that men’s roles in the family were confined to breadwinning
while most important decisions regarding the family were made by women
(Greene & Biddlecom, 2000). As a result, the large majority of studies trying
to understand women’s childbearing behaviors focused on women’s own
attributes, at most “controlling” for the male partner’s characteristics such
as education or earnings.
Such an approach, however, limits our full understanding of family formation choices and behaviors, as it neglects the perspective and agency of men.
The interest among researchers in men and their family-related behaviors
started to emerge only recently. For example, researchers started to look
at how men’s education, position in the labor market, and earnings affect
partners’ conjugal and fertility choices (Blossfeld & Mills, 2010; Kalmijn,
2011) and how the rapid increase in women’s educational attainment,
now surpassing that of men in many advanced nations, affects men’s
(and women’s) opportunities to find a partner (De Hauw, Grow and Van
Bavel, 2015). Increasingly more research is conducted on trends in and
determinants of men’s involvement in the family (Cooke & Baxter, 2010;
Hook, 2006; Kan, Sullivan, & Gershuny, 2011) as well as its consequences for

Emerging Trends: Family Formation and Gender

3

continued childbearing (Bernhardt, Goldscheider, & Turunen, 2014; Brodmann, Esping-Andersen, & Guell, 2007; Cooke, 2009; Duvander, Lappegard,
& Andersson, 2010).
Yet, more research on men in the field of family formation is needed, for
example, on the question of how men perceive and experience the benefits
from and costs of forming a family. It should also inform us on how these
costs and benefits shape men’s intentions to form a union or have a (the next)
child. Previous research has found that the stability of men’s employment
and men’s earnings have strong and positive effects on family formation
(Blossfeld & Mills, 2010; Kalmijn, 2011). We know little, however, on whether
and how these effects have been changing over time and how they vary
across countries. For instance, has the positive effect of men’s labor market outcomes on men’s family formation become less positive over time? If
so, could this be linked to changes in gender relations within the couple as
women’s contributions to the household budget have been increasing and
men have become more involved in childcare? Or conversely, has the role of
men’s socio-economic resources become more important as the low educated
men with poor earnings prospects are becoming less likely to form a family
at all? Evidence for the latter development has been found for instance for
Belgium (Trimarchi & Van Bavel, 2015). What is the role of other factors for
shaping men’s family-related behaviors, that is, the desire to remain free and
uncommitted or the desire to have a certain amount of leisure time?
We also need to better understand why men remain less involved in
housework and childcare than women. The persistence of the gender
gap in housework and childcare, despite the closing gender disparities in
employment, results in work–family tensions experienced by women and
has been argued to be one of the important factors suppressing fertility
(Esping-Andersen & Billari, 2015; Goldscheider, Bernhardt, & Lappegård,
2015). Past research focused mainly on the gender gap in housework and
looked largely at the role of factors that support or inhibit women’s labor
force participation. Extending the discussion from housework to childcare
as well as extending the array of possible determinants to other areas (e.g.,
factors that inhibit men’s involvement in the family) could shed more light
on the gender disparities in involvement at home.
COUPLES
The large majority of children today are born to couples who live together
at the time of the birth of the child, either married or in cohabitation
(Perelli-Harris et al., 2012). Decision-making about whether to have a baby
thus falls in the realm of both partners, often being a joint decision of him

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

and her. This implies that studying linkages between her or his socioeconomic resources such as education or employment and childbearing
individually will likely not capture the underlying process fully, as partners
and interactive processes between them are excluded from this perspective.
Since the 1990s, a growing body of literature explicitly addressed how
interactive dynamics between partners may affect childbearing behavior.
What we know is that among couples, his and her fertility desires and
intentions both appear to matter and predict childbearing behavior of
the couple in an additive and interactive way (Testa, Cavalli, & Rosina,
2014; Thomson, McDonald, & Bumpass, 1990), and increasingly, studies
investigate the underlying decision-making mechanisms among the partners. They suggest, for example, that the relative weight of her and his
intentions on subsequent births varies by parity (Bauer and Kneip, 2014)
or that either partner appears to have a “veto” power when he or she does
not desire any further children but the partner does (Bauer & Kneip, 2013).
Furthermore, the relationship between education, occupation, or income and
childbearing behavior has been shown to vary conditional on the education
or other socioeconomic resources of the partner (Corijn, Liefbroer, & de Jong
Gierveld, 1996; Dribe & Stanfors, 2010). Studies suggest, for instance, that
homogamous highly educated couples have larger second or third birth
hazards in some European countries (Kreyenfeld, 2002; Nitsche, Matysiak,
Van Bavel, & Vignoli, 2015). Yet, there remain many open questions in the
couple-focused childbearing literature. First, the available studies cannot
tell us whether highly educated homogamous couples are less likely to
postpone childbearing or have more children in general and hence more
research that distinguishes between the timing and the actual occurrence
of events is needed. Second, future studies should investigate in greater
detail whether differences in childbearing behavior of certain combinations
of “power couples” (Dribe & Stanfors, 2010) may be due to when these
couples form their unions and have their children or due to how stable their
unions are. Third, we still know little about the underlying mechanisms
of how and why the partners’ socioeconomic resources play together in
couples’ childbearing decision-making. Additional studies are necessary to
investigate these mechanisms in greater detail. They include testing whether
certain groups of couples may differ in how much they outsource domestic
and care work, whether they are matched to a larger degree on family and
gender norm attitudes, or whether they may display systematic differences
in relationship satisfaction, conflict resolution strategies, or value consensus.
Fourth, as the focus in this literature has rather been on highly educated
couples with women who work, we still know little about whether these
couple dynamics operate differently among couples with lower levels of
resources. Fifth, not much is known on whether the relationship between

Emerging Trends: Family Formation and Gender

5

resources and childbearing behaviors and its underlying mechanisms
vary between married and cohabiting couples or between same-sex and
heterosexual couples.
METHODOLOGICAL CHALLENGES
The quantitative methods and models used in the literature on family formation up to ca. the mid-1990s offered rather alone-standing perspectives—for
example focusing on life course outcomes such as marriage or the first birth
one at a time, or life outcomes of groups of single individuals such as men or
women, usually in isolation from the social context. This has since changed:
Methods have been developed to integrate and analyze the complexity of
social processes more holistically. In the field of family formation, researchers
started to acknowledge (i) the interdependency of several parallel or sequential processes by modeling them jointly in the framework of multiprocess
models as theoretically discussed in the life-course perspective (Elder,
Johnson, & Crosnoe 2003), (ii) interdependencies between individuals or
meso-level units nested in the same social context, using multilevel models
(Billingsley & Ferrarini, 2014; Testa, 2014), and (iii) the interconnectedness of
family members, partners, or other meaningfully connected pairs or groups
of individuals using dyad models, as suggested in the linked lives paradigm
(Keizer and Schenk, 2012; Miller, Severy, & David, 2004). Increasingly,
greater effort is also being made to evaluate effects of policies on family
formation after accounting for selection of individuals into the group of
persons eligible to make use of a given policy (Rindfuss, Guilkey, Morgan, &
Kravdal, 2010). In addition, investigations of how complex individual-level
choices interact with each other to produce macrolevel phenomena have
been brought forward. While hazard models provide us with information
on which variables affect the transition of interest, they do not inform us
to what extent these variables contribute to producing population-level
phenomena. Microsimulation techniques and agent-based models were
used for this purpose (Diaz, Fent, Prskawetz & Bernardi, 2011; Rindfuss
et al., 2010; Thomson, Winkler-Dworak, Spielauer, & Prskawetz, 2012). These
methods are great achievements and have led to many new insights but they
are not without limitations. Further developments in the methodological
realm of family formation are necessary.
For instance, (i) multiprocess models helped us to better understand the
causal relations between individual’s behaviors and observe how choices
in one life sphere affect individuals’ behaviors in another sphere. This
method allows to account for selection of individuals into the population
at risk of experiencing an event (e.g., most persons who are at risk of a first
birth have formed a partnership first). It also controls for the unobserved

6

EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

characteristics of individuals that may jointly affect individuals’ behaviors
in several life spheres, such as union formation behaviors and childbearing.
If not accounted for these characteristics will confound the observed relationships between events experienced by individuals in those life spheres.
However, multiprocess models also have certain drawbacks that seriously
limit possibilities for their application. First of all, the estimation process is
computationally very intensive and often results in convergence problems
and the time needed for estimation increases exponentially with an increase
in the number of processes studied. Second, identification of multiprocess
models usually requires repeated events and relies on the assumption that
the unobserved heterogeneity term is constant over time. More research
is thus needed in order to eliminate these shortcomings. One step in this
direction can be the use of Bayesian estimation techniques such as MCMC
(Markov chain Monte Carlo), as it was proposed by Gottard, Mattei, and
Vignoli (2015).
The application of multilevel models (2 and 3) allowed to account for the
interdependency of observations, which are nested in the same setting, for
example, family, household, region, or country and thus share some similar characteristics that may otherwise not be easily captured by researchers.
This approach also contributed strongly to our understanding of how the
social context affects union formation and birth transitions. So far, most of
the research concentrated on the effects of the country-specific context on
individual behaviors (Billingsley & Ferrarini, 2014; Soons & Kalmijn, 2009;
Testa, 2014). More recently, however, multilevel models have increasingly
been used to also account for interdependencies between partners in couples
individuals and to study crossover effects, that is, effects of the characteristics of one partner on fertility intentions or union satisfaction of the other
(Miller, Severy, & David, 2004, Kezier and Schenk 2012). This enables the
modeling of explicit couple-level effects while modeling interactive effects
between the partners themselves, and a wider use of this method would
tremendously enrich the couple-centered literature. More attention is, however, needed in the future applications of the multilevel models as pooling of
countries, regions, or couples introduces a great deal of between-unit (e.g.,
between-country or between-couple) variation. Decomposition of the total
effects into within-unit and between-unit effects is recommended to avoid
producing estimates that are confounded by between-unit variation in the
dependent and independent variables.
Finally, future methodological developments in the field of family formation are needed in order to disentangle between timing and quantum effects.
While some individuals may only postpone union formation or entry to parenthood, others may never experience it. A failure to distinguish between the
postponement and nonoccurrence of the event makes it difficult to conclude

Emerging Trends: Family Formation and Gender

7

whether the predictor variables considered in the models only lead to a delay
in the occurrence of the studied event or whether they prevent it from ever
occurring. For instance, event history models may tell us that highly educated women are usually more likely to postpone the first birth, but they do
not inform us whether they are also more likely to remain childless.
MACROLEVEL FACTORS: SOCIAL POLICIES AND CULTURE
OF EMOTIONS
Family formation processes are embedded in the whole of the surrounding social context. It has long been theorized and shown in empirical
applications that social structure and culture are significantly linked to
family formation behavior. Yet, it has recently been argued that culture is
much more than single social norms or institutionalized practices, namely,
that culture "is an interdependent web of meanings that is structured in
consequential ways" (Bachrach, 2014, p. 5). We follow Bachrach in arguing
that while many cultural aspects, specifically more easily measurable
components such as social policies or social norms, have already been
incorporated into family formation analysis, "the importance of culture
for demographic outcomes" (ibid.) has not been fully appreciated yet in
research on family formation and much work remains to be done in that
area. This applies both to how cultural aspects have been conceptualized,
for example, rather in single pieces (“norms,” “institutions”) than from a
more holistic perspective, as well as to missing cultural elements that may
widen our understanding of how culture shapes family formation behaviors
and how cross-national differences in family formation may come about
(Bachrach, 2014). In the following section, we discuss emerging trends in a
very specific and well-studied area of macrolevel structure, namely, social
policies. Thereafter, we will present our ideas regarding the much more
neglected cultural context of emotions.
SOCIAL POLICIES
Much attention has been paid to institutional elements such as work–family
reconciliation policies, which, at least theoretically, are designed to lower
opportunity costs of parenting and therefore expected to have an impact
on specifically childbearing behavior. Researchers looked into effects on
fertility of childcare provision, maternity, and parental leave schemes,
availability and quality of part-time employment, or workplace policies.
These studies either found conflicting evidence or only small positive effects
of reconciliation policies on fertility. Furthermore, it remained unclear
whether studied policies affected only the timing of births or the number

8

EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

of children eventually born (Gauthier, 2007; Kalwij, 2010; Thevenon & Gauthier, 2011). It thus seems there are many other factors, largely unaddressed
in research, which affect how individuals and couples can reconcile work
and family and, in extension, impact couples’ decisions on whether to add
a/an (additional) child to their family. They include regulations affecting
matters of the practical and daily life of families, specifically those that can
contribute to turning attending to a career and child-rearing simultaneously
into a more stressful and mutually exclusive endeavor. These are, for
instance, poor commuting infrastructure, lengthening travel time between
workplace and home (Huinink & Feldhaus, 2012) or rigid regulations on
opening hours limiting access to supermarkets or services such as post
offices, health care, or extracurricular activities for children. Such rigidities
may gain in importance with increasing expectations toward parents to
invest in their children (Leigh, Pacholok, Snape, & Gauthier, 2012) and in the
“work-devotion” cultures where long working hours and devotion to paid
work are highly rewarded (Blair-Loy, 2003; Pedulla and Thebaud, 2015).
While representative data on these issues is not readily available, it can be
collected and would further advance our understanding of the impact of
institutional and macrolevel cultural factors on family formation.
THE CULTURAL CONTEXT OF EMOTIONS
Another cultural aspect, largely neglected to date in sociology and demography in general and the research on family formation in particular, is the role of
emotions, both on the individual and on the macrolevel (Massey, 2002). Emotions likely play a chief role in relationship formation and childbearing considerations of individuals and couples (Basu, 2006), given that they have been
shown to be important for other decision-making processes (Isen & Means,
1983; Loewenstein, 2000). On the individual level, emotions such as a desire
for a baby (“baby fever”) may drive the decision to try to become pregnant
(Brase & Brase, 2012). Drops in subjective well-being of parents around the
time of their first birth in Germany have for instance been shown to be predictive of a depressed second birth hazards later on (Margolis & Myrskylä,
2015). Yet, subjective emotional experiences are a largely neglected but perhaps central piece in understanding variance in childbearing behavior, both
within and between countries. We suggest that paying more attention to emotion and emotional expression and management as a cultural phenomenon
on the macro-level would be fruitful for broadening our understaning of
what drives cross-cultural differences in family formation behaviors. While
there is debate in social psychology on whether emotions are biologically
innate or socially constructed, it has been argued that subjective emotional
experiences do not develop in a vacuum but that they are influenced by

Emerging Trends: Family Formation and Gender

9

their social surroundings (Thoits, 1989; Turner, 2009). Cultures appear to have
distinct ideas of how emotions should be dealt with and can be acceptably
expressed and regulated (Bowie et al., 2013; Jenkins & Karno, 1992). We therefore think that investigating emotion-culture may hold one of the keys for a
deeper understanding of, for example, the way parents emotionally perceive
the upbringing of their first child in the social context they live in. Teaching young children emotional regulation and coping with their emotional
displays, particularly in public spaces, may be perceived as more or less
stressful to parents dependent upon the emotional culture of the society. The
emotional culture may affect how accepting and supportive others—from
grandparents, teachers, service personnel in public places to bystanders and
strangers—may react to children and emotional interactions between parents
and children. For instance, if parents perceive handling children in public
as stressful due to repeated reactions that are perceived as unfriendly and
unsupportive, they may be less inclined to progress to having an additional
child. This could be a factor in understanding variations in second birth progressions across Europe. While survey data used for demographic analysis
sometimes includes questions on the emotional states and experiences of
individuals, we do not know of any survey data providing information on
emotional culture or norms pertaining to emotional expression and regulation. Thus, we suggest that future studies and data collection should attempt
to expand on the array of possible contextual and cultural factors that may
affect work–family conflict.
CONCLUSIONS AND OUTLOOK
In this reflection on current and future relevant directions of research on family formation, we have covered a few areas in which we see specific potential
for further developments. This means that we made a deliberate selection
based on our very own interests and perceptions, and does not imply that
the areas we have not discussed at all are of less relevance. They include
topics such as the diversification of family forms, for example, homosexual
families or step-families and adoptions, network influences on family formation behaviors, and research on the biological underpinnings of and their
relevance for union formation and childbearing behaviors.
We would like to close with a comment on implicit and hidden assumptions, a comment that applies to future developments in all research areas
alike. As has been pointed out long ago, theories and approaches to empirical research in the behavioral sciences are usually built on assumptions,
and only some of those are made explicit, while others remain unsaid and
sometimes unreflected upon (Slife & Williams, 1995). We would like to
encourage ourselves and other social scientists and family demographers

10

EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

to challenge ourselves and become more aware of and explicit about those
unreflected assumptions we have yet that likely shape our selection of
topics to study, research questions, theories, methods, and interpretations of
findings. For example, the previously pronounced concentration of family
formation research on women in both data collections and empirical studies
was likely based on the socially constructed idea that women are primarily
responsible for childbearing and child-rearing and thus need to be in the
focus of this type of research. Of course, this is not the case and the field
has been changing accordingly to increasingly include data collection and
studies on men and couple dynamics. Taking the idea of gendered “separate
spheres” as a given reality may have been overcome in family demography
in the twenty-first century. Yet we believe that thinking deeply about which
implicit assumptions are guiding our choices in the research we conduct
every day may help us to opening up new directions and perspectives in
family demography and beyond.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The work leading to this essay was supported by the European Union’s
Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007–2013) through research funding
from the European Research Council (ERC no. 284238 (EURREP) for Anna
Matysiak) and a Marie Curie Action (no. 627543 (COUPFER) for Natalie
Nitsche).
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ANNA MATYSIAK SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Anna Matysiak is a research scientist at the Wittgenstein Center, Vienna Institute of Demography (ÖAW) and an assistant professor at the Warsaw School
of Economics, Institute of Statistics and Demography. She received her PhD
in economics in 2009. Her research interests cover family dynamics and its
interrelationships with socioeconomic position of individuals, their quality
of life, gender, and the institutional context of the country. She published
mostly on the effects on the interdependencies between women’s labor force
participation and family formation/dissolution, work–family conflict, consequences of family formation on subjective well-being, and diffusion of new
family forms.
NATALIE NITSCHE SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Natalie Nitsche is a postdoctoral associate at the Wittgenstein Center, Vienna
Institute of Demography (ÖAW). She earned her PhD in sociology from Yale
University in 2014. Her research interests include family and couple dynamics such as union formation, childbearing behavior, and the division of paid
and unpaid work between partners. She is specifically interested in understanding how these family processes change over the life course and over
generations, and how they relate to educational and employment trajectories
of individuals and groups.
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Maternal and Paternal Employment across the Life Course (Sociology),
Michaela Kreyenfeld
Women Running for Office (Political Science), Jennifer L. Lawless
Positive Development among Diverse Youth (Psychology), Richard M. Lerner
et al.
The Future of Marriage (Sociology), Elizabeth Aura McClintock
Gender Inequality in Educational Attainment (Sociology), Anne McDaniel
and Claudia Buchmann
Gender and Women’s Influence in Public Settings (Political Science), Tali
Mendelberg et al.
Implicit Attitude Measures (Psychology), Gregory Mitchell and Philip E.
Tetlock
A Bio-Social-Cultural Approach to Early Cognitive Development: Entering
the Community of Minds (Psychology), Katherine Nelson
Feminists in Power (Sociology), Ann Orloff and Talia Schiff
Born This Way: Thinking Sociologically about Essentialism (Sociology),
Kristen Schilt
Stereotype Threat (Psychology), Toni Schmader and William M. Hall
Family Income Composition (Sociology), Kristin E. Smith
Gender and Work (Sociology), Christine L. Williams and Megan Tobias Neely
Social Neuroendocrine Approaches to Relationships (Sociology), Sari M. van
Anders and Peter B. Gray
Recent Demographic Trends and the Family (Sociology), Lawrence L. Wu



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Emerging Trends: Family Formation and Gender