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Intergenerational Transmission of Multipartner Fertility

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Demography

Abstract

Using data from administrative registers for the period 1970–2007 in Norway and Sweden, we investigate the intergenerational transmission of multipartner fertility. We find that men and women with half-siblings are more likely to have children with more than one partner. The differences are greater for those with younger versus older half-siblings, consistent with the additional influence of parental separation that may not arise when one has only older half-siblings. The additional risk for those with both older and younger half-siblings suggests that complexity in childhood family relationships also contributes to multipartner fertility. Only a small part of the intergenerational association is accounted for by education in the first and second generations. The association is to some extent gendered. Half-siblings are associated with a greater risk of women having children with a new partner in comparison with men. In particular, maternal half-siblings are more strongly associated with multipartner fertility than paternal half-siblings only for women.

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Notes

  1. Other estimates of prevalence are lower but based on all women/men or all mothers/fathers or limit the age range of parents (Gray and Evans 2008; Guzzo 2014; Guzzo and Furstenberg 2007; Lappegård et al. 2011).

  2. We also estimated models with father’s education in the first generation, both mother’s and father’s education, and the highest education in the first generation; results were essentially the same as those reported in this article.

  3. In Sweden, education was not registered annually until 1985; a measure of parents’ education was available from the 1970 census, used for those who reached age 16 between 1968 and 1984.

  4. Because we observe the entire populations and particularly because the number of observations is so large, statistical tests of model fit or specific interaction contrasts are not particularly meaningful. We discuss instead the size of differences between the intergenerational associations for women and men.

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the Research Council of Norway (202442/S20) and the Swedish Research Council through support for the Linneaeus Center for Social Policy and Family Dynamics in Europe (SPaDE) as well as by Stockholm University Demography Unit and Statistics Norway Research department. The register collection, Sweden in Time – Activities and Relations (STAR) is supported in part by grants from the Swedish Research Council. We are grateful for research assistance on the Swedish data from Jani Turunen. The findings and views reported in this article are those of the authors alone.

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  1. Department of Sociology and Human Geography, University of Oslo, Postboks 1096 Blindern, 0317, Oslo, Norway

    Trude Lappegård

  2. Research Department, Statistics Norway, Oslo, Norway

    Trude Lappegård

  3. Demography Unit, Department of Sociology, Stockholm University, 106 91, Stockholm, Sweden

    Trude Lappegård & Elizabeth Thomson

  4. Center for Demography and Ecology, Department of Sociology, University of Wisconsin–Madison, 1180 Observatory Drive, Madison, WI, 53706-1393, USA

    Elizabeth Thomson

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Lappegård, T., Thomson, E. Intergenerational Transmission of Multipartner Fertility. Demography 55, 2205–2228 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13524-018-0727-y

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