TEMPORARY DESTANDARDISATION OF PARTNERSHIP FORMATION AND CONTINUOUS STANDARDISATION OF FERTILITY IN THREE GGS COUNTRIES

Abstract

The hypothesis of destandardisation, which was popular in the 1980s and 1990s, has been revised and modified since the turn of the millennium because ithas not been supported by empirical research (Kohli2007). Destandardisation is still assumed to affect family formation more than other are as of the life course, though fertility and partnership appear to be developing differently and there are indications that a new phase of restandardisation has commenced. Comparative analysis of the life course using sequence analysis is scarce, despite this methodology often being regarded as superior to event history analysis when analysing social change (Elder 1985, Aisenbrey and Fasang 2010). To close this gap in research, this paper tests the hypothesis of destandardisation suggested by prior research in different European countries using sequence analysis. Family formation in three countries from different European regions (except for Eastern Europe) is evaluated using data from the first wave of the Generations and Gender Survey and simple versions of Optimal Matching Analysis to calculate average dissimilarities. The main conclusion of this study is that destandardisation affected partnership formation, not family formation, and was only a temporary phenomenon. Because of the limited range of the available data, this research should be considered a starting point for further analysis on more countries, in order to assess generalisability, as country differences are apparent and the applicability of hypotheses potentially varies in different institutional contexts.