Sibling Similarity in Family Formation

Marcel Raab (), Anette Fasang (), Aleksi Karhula and Jani Erola

Demography, 2014, vol. 51, issue 6, 2127-2154

Abstract: Sibling studies have been widely used to analyze the impact of family background on socioeconomic and, to a lesser extent, demographic outcomes. We contribute to this literature with a novel research design that combines sibling comparisons and sequence analysis to analyze longitudinal family-formation trajectories of siblings and unrelated persons. This allows us to scrutinize in a more rigorous way whether sibling similarity exists in family-formation trajectories and whether siblings’ shared background characteristics, such as parental education and early childhood family structure, can account for similarity in family formation. We use Finnish register data from 1987 through 2007 to construct longitudinal family-formation trajectories in young adulthood for siblings and unrelated dyads (N=14,257 dyads). Findings show that family formation is moderately but significantly more similar for siblings than for unrelated dyads, also after controlling for crucial parental background characteristics. Shared parental background characteristics add surprisingly little to account for sibling similarity in family formation. Instead, gender and the respondents’ own education are more decisive forces in the stratification of family formation. Yet, family internal dynamics seem to reinforce this stratification such that siblings have a higher probability to experience similar family-formation patterns. In particular, patterns that correspond with economic disadvantage are concentrated within families. This is in line with a growing body of research highlighting the importance of family structure in the reproduction of social inequality. Copyright The Author(s) 2014

Keywords: Family formation; Siblings; Sequence analysis; Demographic trajectories; Dyadic analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (12)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s13524-014-0341-6 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:demogr:v:51:y:2014:i:6:p:2127-2154

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/13524

DOI: 10.1007/s13524-014-0341-6

Access Statistics for this article

Demography is currently edited by John D. Iceland, Stephen A. Matthews and Jenny Van Hook

More articles in Demography from Springer, Population Association of America (PAA)
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().