Who matters, for better and for worse? Personal networks in an international perspective

Jacques-Antoine Gauthier, currently visiting CRFR from the University of Lausanne, summarises the research he presented at a recent CRFR Informal Seminar.

What do we know about the conditions that favour or hamper the ways in which individuals get connected to each other in a significant way? Are personal networks influenced by life course transitions such as marriage and parenthood (or their absence)? Do they change from one country to another?  

A recently published book (Wall, Widmer, Gauthier, Česnuitytė, & Gouveia, 2018) based on a study carried out in Lithuania, Portugal and Switzerland offers some new insights on these issues by asking the question Who are the individuals who, over the past year, have been very important to you, even if you do not get along well with them? First, despite variations over time and place, the research underlines that close relationships continue to form the base of personal networks, challenging the idea of a global decline of the family through the process of individualisation.

This study shows that the closeness between individuals is the result of multiple influences. It is often built over time through co-residence, couple and intergenerational relationships. It also depends on the way cohabitation, birth outside wedlock, childlessness or same sex-marriage are socially perceived and by the place given to friendship and colleagueship. More generally, gender, generation and social class remain influential regarding how close one feels to somebody else. An additional effect may be also attributable to welfare states when considering how their singular historical, social, and normative contexts influence the construction of their citizens’ personal networks.

In Switzerland, long-term stable and wealthy living conditions are associated with liberal policies and ideologies supporting individualised behaviours. At the same time, enduring conservative forces support a rather traditional dynamic of family life and gendered division of labour. Hence, high importance is attributed to friendship and colleagueship within more traditional interdependencies associated with marriage and parenthood.

In Portugal, a long period of low welfare provision associated with a right-wing dictatorship favoured strong intergenerational solidarities and patriarchal models of the family, later thoroughly transformed by the emergence of new family forms and more gender-equal representations. As a result, personal networks are now more adaptable and differentiated. While open to friends, kin and non-kin relationships are combined in a much less exclusive way compared to the other two countries.

In Lithuania, personal networks reflect the hardship and uncertainties associated with the former Soviet occupation and its aftermath. Political instability and economic unrest lead to mass migration and day-to-day struggles, favouring new normative frames focused on pro-traditional family values and policies. Compared with Switzerland and Portugal, personal networks in Lithuania are smaller and less open to non-kin relationships. Despite their smaller size and strong kin orientation, they provide weaker emotional support, which makes them also less cohesive.

The book sheds new light on the complexity of the contexts and conditions potentially influencing the ways in which personal networks are constructed. In particular it shows that their diversity is predominantly shaped by historical and social factors on which private individuals have only a limited influence. 

Jacques-Antoine Gauthier
Universities of Lausanne and Edinburgh

 Jacques-Antoine.Gauthier@unil.ch


Reference

Wall, K., Widmer, E. D., Gauthier, J.-A., Česnuitytė, V., & Gouveia, R. (Éd.). (2018). Families and Personal Networks An International Comparative Perspective. Palgrave McMillan. 
Full text version available at: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1057%2F978-1-349-95263-2

Contested Cohabitation Rights

Following recent debates on inheritance rights for cohabiting couples, we welcome this guest blog from Samantha Callan and Linda McKie, authors of Understanding Families: a Global Introduction:

"One of the aims of our recently published book, Understanding Families: a Global Introduction, was to introduce readers to many of the academic and popular debates that swirl around the subject of family life in the twenty-first century. Chapter Five considered the diversity of couple relationships accorded social legitimacy in many minority world contexts – yet attitudes remain complex and contested. We explained how marriage has become deinstitutionalised: less governed by the social norms that provide a framework for behaviour, and increasingly concerned with the quality of the relationship.

The US demographer Andrew Cherlin points out, somewhat paradoxically, that in many countries there is a contrary trend of relationships such as cohabitation becoming more institutionalized. In the United States, states are taking steps towards granting cohabiting couples married couples’ rights and responsibilities. Canada has erased legal distinctions between marrieds and unmarrieds (heterosexual or same-sex) who have lived together for more than a year and French Civil Solidarity Pacts give registered couples most of the rights and responsibilities of those who have wed after three years of the pact being signed.

This trend towards institutionalising relationships which are considered to be, intrinsically, more informal continues to excite heated discussion. Last month the United Kingdom House of Lords debated a Private Members Bill on the subject of inheritance rights for cohabitants in cases of intestacy (where someone dies without leaving a will). Lord Lester of Herne Hill, a respected law reformer, proposed in the Bill that a surviving cohabitant would automatically be entitled to the same share that a bereaved spouse would receive if they and the deceased had had a child together and had lived in the same household as if they were married or in a civil partnership for two years; if the relationship was childless the qualifying period would be five years.

Protagonists on both sides claimed the moral high ground of preserving choice in making their arguments: Lord Lester stated that a decision not to get married should not lead to legal disadvantage while Baroness Deech passionately defended citizens’ rights not to be governed by the law if they had decided against or simply not made the explicit commitment of marriage. Among other sources she quoted extensively and perhaps counter-intuitively from Guardian blogs on the subject. The most humorous paragraph in the debate undoubtedly being, “They move the goalposts so that despite not being married, you can still get your wallet nicked.”

The Hansard transcript does better justice to the complexity of the surrounding arguments but does not make the outcome of the debate explicit. Although the Government Minister did not oppose the continuing passage of the Bill into the Committee Stage, the ‘strong reservations’ he expressed on its behalf mean that it will languish in the procedural doldrums and get nowhere. Many issues of family law meet the same fate in the UK and other Parliaments, precisely because of their personal and contested nature. Many (but not all) judges, legal practitioners and media commentators clamour for the certainty of black letter law. But it is precisely the lack of a clear public consensus that makes this particularly dangerous territory for politicians in many jurisdictions to stray into – and likely to remain so."

Enduring love?

Professor Lynn Jamieson, Co-Director at CRFR spoke at the launch of the Enduring Love project in January. As an affiliate organisation we thought it would be a good opportunity to give this very interesting research project and their questionnaire a plug!

Complete the questionnaire and find out more at: http://www8.open.ac.uk/researchprojects/enduringlove/

Relationships still matter to Scotland’s new parents

Sarah Morton, CRFR Co-director and Lynn Jamieson, CRFR Co-director

New Registrar General figures released last week show that for the first time in Scotland more than half of babies were born to unmarried parents. Interestingly we are not the first part of the UK to reflect this change, with Wales reaching this point in 1993.

The news has been greeted with the predictable ringing of hands about the state of the family and concern about the plight of children born into these kinds of families. But what does this figure tell us about the root of these concerns - whether or not children are being born into stable, loving, long-term relationships?

Most of the 50.1 % of children in the headlines will be born into couple households where the couple are living together unmarried, rather than being born to solo mothers. The Registrar General’s report shows that the proportion of births registered only in the mothers name is just 6% and has remained fairly constant for over twenty years. Since 1995 a record has been kept of whether an unmarried mother and father registering a birth live at the same address. According to Scottish Government figures, as the proportion of married parents has shrunk so there has been an equivalent increase in births to parents living together. In 2007, 32% of births are jointly registered to parents living at the same address, 11% to parents at separate addresses and 6% by mothers alone.

It is now normal for most couples in Scotland to live together before they get married, and attitude surveys show that only a very small proportion of the population make any moral distinction between living together as couple and marriage. It may be that living together is seen as a sensible ‘testing’ of a relationship before making a fuller commitment. Or developing a sexual relationship and living together may have become ways of getting to know a partner and have become new conventional milestones in the process of constructing a long-term and perhaps life-long partnership.

Some cohabitees will go on to get married, and might indeed have intended to get married before having children. Perhaps the economic downturn will have put marriage plans on hold, especially with some experts claiming that the average cost of a wedding tops £20,000. A study by Jamieson and colleagues of married and cohabiting couples in their twenties living in Fife showed that many were in stable committed relationships but were not very concerned about their marital status. A very small minority were in the category that would have had ‘shotgun’ weddings in the past – their unplanned pregnancy had lead to them cohabiting and seeking to cement their relationship.

As there is no way to officially record co-habitation, it is difficult to research. We can record divorce rates but there is no official recording of cohabitation breakdown rates so there are no figures to compare. The British Household Panel survey asks people about their relationship status and follows them over time, and it is only through this kind of longitudinal data that we can unpick the facts. This type of data has been used to argue that cohabiting relationships are more fragile than married relationships. However, studies by Kamp Dush and Wu comparing relationship breakdown of cohabitees who marry before and after having children has also found no difference. Therefore, there is a continuing debate about whether or not cohabitees with children are more likely to separate than married couples, especially when we take other factors into account.

Looking across the decades since the 1970s, we know that the more well-off have always been more likely to marry and remain married. Less wealthy people may not have the resources for the wedding they would like, and less financial security contributes to relationship breakdown. When marriage was still the most common form of couple relationship, research has shown that the poorer were more likely to experience relationship breakdown and those who were poor and married very young were the most at risk.

If we translate these trends into today’s figures, there is very little change in what matters about the relationship status of Scotland’s new parents. Most babies will be born into as stable families as before, but just over half without the official stamp of marriage. Most new parents will be setting out to nurture and sustain their family unit. Whether or not they are married, a small proportion will separate as the children grow up. The Growing Up in Scotland study, a longitudinal study annually following infants, shows that in the course of their early years, between the first and second years of the study, more children gained a father in their household because of the partnering of a lone mother than experience the loss of a father. In the majority of new partnerships, it is the biological parents who have started to live together. The new figures reflect that marriage is a declining trend, but not that relationships no longer matter.

For further information about the Growing up in Scotland study, see the Growing Up In Scotland website.

For further information about other research cited in this blog please see the reference page.