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The prevalence of nonmarital cohabitation is steadily increasing in the United States. In evaluating the contribution of this new living arrangement to family formation, analysts have relied primarily on comparisons between individuals who cohabit and those who do not. We complement this line of inquiry by comparing the United States and 16 industrialized nations. We first identify six conceptually distinct ideal types of cohabitation with respect to family formation. We then propose empirical indicators to distinguish between the different ideal types, and estimate the values of these indicators for each of the 17 nations. Our findings indicate that although a number of countries fit an empirical pattern corresponding to one ideal type, cohabitation in the United States is more difficult to characterize.
Key Words: childbearing, cohabitation, divorce, single parent.
Normative attitudes on family formation have been changing rapidly in the United States since at least the 1960s (Pagnini & Rindfuss, 1993; Thornton, 1989). As shown by Axinn and Thornton (1993), these attitudinal trends have both contributed to and resulted from concomitant declines in the prevalence of a traditional family formation sequence in which adults first get married, then live together, and finally have children. The deviation from this sequence that has received the most attention in the United States is undoubtedly childbearing before marriage. The increase in the proportion of births to unmarried mothers-from 4.0% in 1950 to 33.0% in 1999 (Ventura & Bachrach, 2000)-is indeed one of the most impressive trends, and a large literature now documents the effects on children of growing up with a single parent (e.g., McLanahan & Sandefur, 1994).
Until recently, living together before marriage generated much less public attention, although family scholars have debated whether to interpret unmarried cohabitation as a prelude to marriage-that is, a simple inversion in the timing of two events (marrying and cohabiting)-or as an alternative to marriage-that is, a decision not to marry. This scholarly debate might have remained just that, as long as unmarried cohabitation was not publicly perceived as a childbearing institution. In fact, Rindfuss and VandenHeuvel (1990) found that unmarried cohabiting couples in the United States exhibited much of the same characteristic behaviors as single dating people, and suggested that cohabitation was an alternative to being single rather than to...