Changing Familiy Patterns in France

In most Western countries, the pattern of family formation has changed significantly since the 1960s. In the past decades, men and women have married less and have had fewer children and at older ages than their predecessors, and they have cohabited and divorced more often. Due to decreasing stability of marriages and consensual unions, higher-order unions have become more widespread and childbearing is no longer restricted to one marital or consensual union. As a consequence of these demographic changes, individuals may experience a variety of family settings as they pass through their life course. This project aims at investigating family life trajectories in France and their changes over the recent past. The focus is on analysing how partnership and childbearing decisions are interrelated in shaping the family life course of individuals, their implications on outcomes of family life, and their changes over time. The first objective is to investigate whether the changes in family formation and fertility have changed individuals` pathways through partnership and childbearing. In particular, do individuals experience a greater variety of family life trajectories, which are more eventful and less strictly patterned than in the past? In short, have individuals` family life trajectories become more de-standardised? The second goal of this study is to investigate how partnership and fertility processes are interrelated. In addition to direct mutual effects, there might be also unobserved factors that simultaneously influence individuals` union formation, union dissolution and fertility behaviour. By jointly modelling partnership and childbearing behaviour, we intend to identify the existence and direction of selection effects originating from common unobserved characteristics. The latter findings will be crucial for our third objective, i.e., the outcomes of family life trajectories and their changes over time. In particular, we are interested in the impact of union instability on completed fertility levels. On the one hand, declines in union stability may have made it more difficult for individuals to attain their desired number of children in a single union. On the other hand, union instability may produce `extra` births in a higher-order union through re-partnering. The balance between these two opposing effects may contribute to variations in the extent of low fertility across countries.