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Changes in family and kinship networks consequent on the demographic transitions in England and Wales

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 May 2010

MICHAEL MURPHY
MICHAEL MURPHY
Affiliation:
Department of Social Policy, London School of Economics.
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Abstract

The SOCSIM micro-simulation model is used to investigate how kinship and family patterns in Britain changed as people passed through the ‘First Demographic Transition’, starting in the late nineteenth century, and the ‘Second Demographic Transition’, from the 1960s. Certain types of kin, such as former partners, became more common, and others, such as ever-born siblings, less so. An ageing of generational relationships is observed: events that formerly occurred early in life, such as the experience of one's parents' deaths, are being postponed. Patterns of re-partnering are leading to more partial relationships involving step- and supplanted parents, half-siblings, former partners and stepchildren.

Changements dans les réseaux de famille et de parenté consécutifs à la transition démographique en grande bretagne

Nous avons utilisé le modèle de micro-simulation SOCSIM pour rechercher en quoi les modèles de parenté et de famille ont changé suite à la première transition démographique de la fin du XIXe siècle et suite à la seconde qui date des années 1960. Certains types de liens de parenté tels ceux liant d'anciens compagnons et compagnes sont devenus plus courants, d'autres le sont devenus moins, tels les rapports entre enfants de la famille devenus moins nombreux. On observe aussi que les relations entre générations durent plus longtemps: l'expérience de la mort des parents se produit plus tard au cours de la vie. Et les formes que prennent les réaccouplements impliquent des relations plus distendues avec les beaux-parents anciens et nouveaux, les demi-frères ou sœurs, les compagnons précédents et les beaux-enfants.

Der wandel der familien- und verwandtschaftsnetzwerke in folge der demographischen übergänge in großbritannien

Mit Hilfe des Mikrosimulationsmodels SOCSIM wird untersucht, wie sich im Zuge des ersten demographischen Übergangs, der im späten 19. Jahrhundert einsetzte, und dann im zweiten demographischen Übergang seit den 1960er Jahren die Verwandtschafts- und Familienmuster änderten. Verwandte bestimmten Typs wie z.B. frühere Ehepartner, wurden häufiger, andere dagegen seltener, wie z.B. Geschwister. Auch eine Alterung der Generationenbeziehungen lässt sich beobachten: Ereignisse, die man früher eher in jungen Jahren erlebte, wie z.B. den Tod eines Elternteils, treten nun später auf. Dadurch, dass mehrfach im Leben feste Partnerschaften eingegangen werden, gibt es mehr Teilbeziehungen und demzufolge mehr Stief- und Ersatzeltern, Halbgeschwister, Ex-Partner und Stiefkinder.

Type
Research Article
Information
Continuity and Change , Volume 25 , Special Issue 1: SPECIAL ISSUE ON KINSHIP IN BRITAIN AND BEYOND FROM THE EARLY MODERN TO THE PRESENT , May 2010 , pp. 109 - 136
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

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References

ENDNOTES

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4 The group born in the period 1945–1964 is often but incorrectly referred to as ‘baby-boomers’, which is taken from US fertility patterns. In fact in Britain, there were more births in the quinquennium 1971–1975 than in central period of the nominal ‘baby boom’ period.

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6 For example, D. Coleman, ‘Population prospects and problems in Europe’, in the special issue of Genus, ‘Trends and problems of the world population in the XXI century’, LXI, 3–4 (2005), 413–66.

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18 E. Grundy and M. Murphy, ‘Kin availability, contact and support exchanges between adult children and their parents in Great Britain’, in F. Ebtehaj, B. Lindley and M. Richards eds., Kinship matters (Oxford, 2006), 195–215.

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20 Murphy, ‘Evolution of cohabitation’.

21 A closed model is one where marriage partners have to be found from within the non-married simulated population rather than being created when required, in the case of open models. K. W. Wachter, ‘Micro-simulation of household cycles’, in Bongaarts, Burch and Wachter eds., Family demography, 215–27.

22 Note that this is not possible where a woman gives birth without an identified partner (in this analysis, any birth outside of a cohabiting or marital union), since such fathers are regarded as unknown. Thus the data for certain types of kin presented here, such as the proportion with surviving parents and grandparents, are based on the sub-group of people all of whose relevant relatives are known, although alternative calculations including children with missing fathers (and grandfathers in the case of grandparental estimates) have also been made. Such births outside of a partnership in this model account for about 5 per cent of births until around 1950, but the figure had increased to about 10 per cent by 2000.

23 M. Murphy, ‘Bringing behaviour back into micro-simulation: feedback mechanisms in demographic models’, in F. Billari and A. Prskawetz eds., Agent-based computational demography: using simulation to improve our understanding of demographic behaviour (Heidelberg, 2003), 159–74.

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25 Office of Population Censuses and Surveys, 1991 census: historical tables, Great Britain, (London: 1993), Table 6: Census unpublished tabulation M538, sex and age by partnership and limiting long-term illness, England & Wales, are available via http://www.ons.gov.uk/about/who-we-are/our-services/unpublished-data/census-data/census-commissioned-tables#top.

26 Details are available at http://www.data-archive.ac.uk/findingData/snDescription.asp?sn=4222). See also Grundy, E., Murphy, M. and Shelton, N., ‘Looking beyond the household: inter-generational perspectives on living kin and contacts with kin in Great Britain’, Population Trends 97 (1999), 19–27Google Scholar.

27 The same holds potentially for the future as well; see M. Murphy, ‘Family and kinship networks in the context of ageing societies’, in S. Tuljapurkar, N. Ogawa and A. Gauthier eds., Responses to aging in advanced industrial states: riding the age waves, Volume 3 (New York, 2010; forthcoming).

28 The RMS difference is the square root of the mean of the squared difference of the fitted and actual values in each age group. It therefore indicates the typical level of error of the fitted values, which will be in percentage terms for data such as Table 3 and number of kin in Table 4. In the case of data for 1900, the average proportion of people with a partner is about 40 per cent and the average error is only about 0.5 per cent, indicating a close fit between the actual and fitted values. The magnitude of these values may be compared with the actual values. Note that in this case, unlike with the marital status data, the actual values are estimates obtained from survey data and are therefore subject to random sampling error; this will mean that the fitted values will be compared with estimates that are themselves subject to error, so the differences between the fitted and true values will probably be less than with these estimates, so the values of the RMS difference understate the precision of these results.

29 This is simply the equivalent of taking censuses of the same population at different points in time and producing summary measures of kinship networks at these points.

30 J. Hajnal, ‘European marriage patterns in perspective’, in D. V. Glass and D. E. C. Eversley eds., Population in history: essays in historical demography (London, 1965), 101–43; Hajnal, J., ‘Two kinds of preindustrial household formation system’, Population and Development Review 8, 3 (1982), 449–94CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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33 Berrington, A. and Murphy, M., ‘Changes in the living arrangements of young people in Britain during the 1980s’, European Sociological Review 10, 3 (1994), 235–57CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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35 Kalogirou, S. and Murphy, M., ‘Marital status of people aged 75 and over in nine EU countries in the period 2000–2030’, European Journal of Ageing 3, 2 (2006), 74–81CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

36 Murphy, ‘Evolution of cohabitation’.

37 Grundy and Murphy, ‘Kin availability’.

38 EUROFAMCARE Consortium eds., The trans-European survey report (February 2006), available at http://www.uke.uni-hamburg.de/extern/eurofamcare/documents/deliverables/teusure_web_060906.pdf, Table 59.

39 Murphy, M., Martikainen, P. and Pennec, S., ‘Demographic change and the supply of potential family supporters in Britain, Finland and France in the period 1911–2050’, European Journal of Population 22, 3 (2006), 19–40Google Scholar.

40 At the age at which 50 per cent of people have at least one parent alive, the average number of parents will be greater or equal to 0.5 (since all those with a parent alive have at least one parent) but less than or equal to 1.0 (since not all of these will have both parents alive), therefore the average will lie between 0.5 and 1.0.

41 Murphy, Martikainen and Pennec, ‘Demographic change’.

42 More detailed estimates are given by D. T. Rowland, ‘Historical trends in childlessness’, Journal of Family Issues 28, 10 (2007), 1311–37.

43 R. Woods, The demography of Victorian England and Wales (Cambridge: 2000).

44 Ibid.; Office of Population Censuses and Surveys, Birth statistics: historical series of statistics from registrations of births in England and Wales, 1837–1983, Series FM1 no. 13 (London, 1983).

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46 Murphy, ‘Bringing behaviour back’; Registrar General, 1911 Census of England and Wales, Vol. XIII: Fertility of marriages, part II (London, 1923).

47 A similar point – that having a sibling will remain very common in the context of the much lower fertility regime of Italy – was made by Tomassini, C. and Wolf, D. A., in ‘Shrinking kin networks in Italy due to sustained low fertility’, European Journal of Population 16 (2001), 353–72CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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52 These figures are similar to those found by Haskey, in his ‘Stepfamilies’; see also M. Murphy, ‘Chapter 4: Family living arrangements and health’, in S. Smallwood and B. Wilson eds., Focus on families (Basingstoke, 2007), 56–69.

53 This article is not concerned with co-residence, so ‘family’ refers to a kin group rather than to the statistically convenient but socially incomplete definition of a family as a co-resident nuclear unit. A situation where a couple splits up leaving the children with the mother, and she forms a new partnership, is different from one where the father does so, since the child is likely to be in a very different relationship with the new partner in these two cases.

54 M. Anderson, ‘What's new about the modern family?’, in The family: proceedings of the British Society for Population Studies Conference, 1983, Office of Population Censuses and Surveys occasional paper no. 31 (London, 1983), 1–16.

55 Wachter, ‘Kinship resources’, 1997.

56 F. Fukuyama, Trust: the social virtues and the creation of prosperity (New York, 1995); R. D. Putnam, Bowling alone: the collapse and revival of American community (New York, 2000).

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