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One of the key features of Vietnamese family organization is patrilocality-the preference of married couples to core.side with the husband's parents. With data drawn from a retrospective survey of persons in 1,855 households in the largest province in the Red River Delta in northern Vietnam, we found that more than 75% of married respondents reported having lived with the grooms' family after marriage. The proportion of newly married couples that follow the patrilocal custom appears to have increased in recent decades, although the average duration of coresidence has declined. Some aspects of modernization, especially nonagricultural occupations and later age at marriage, contribute to a lower incidence of intergenerational coresidence, but the underlying cultural preference to live with the grooms' parents immediately after marriage appears to have become stronger in Vietnam. In contrast to some features of traditional family life that conflict with modernity, intergenerational coresidence can be quite functional in modernizing societies.
Key Words: intergenerational coresidence, marriage, patrilocal, Vietnam.
The standard account of the traditional Vietnamese family follows the Confucian ideals of patrilocal residence, patrilineal descent, and patriarchal authority structure. This perspective, however, has been questioned by ethnographic accounts that report a much more varied and flexible Vietnamese family structure in practice, influenced as much by the bilateral family systems of Southeast Asia as by the Confucian legacy (Hickey, 1964; Luong, 1989). Adding to this literature was our recent article, which reported that neolocal residence was the modal family residential pattern in Vietnam (Hirschman & Vu, 1996). This finding, and the conclusion that patrilocal customs were not the dominant cultural pattern in Vietnam, now appears to be premature. Although there is social change underway leading to shorter durations of coresidence, the research reported here shows that patrilocality remains a central and pervasive feature of Vietnamese family structure. These findings on the continued observance of patrilocal customs in Vietnam are consistent with research on family structure in China and Taiwan, societies that also share a Confucian cultural heritage (Davis & Harrell, 1993; Thornton & Lin, 1994).
THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVES ON FAMILY CHANGE
Families are the central units of social organization and reproduction in all societies. Indeed, family organization and the customs associated with intergenerational coresidence are often considered to be defining elements of the cultural...