Abstract
In order to better understand family changes in contemporary Taiwanese society, we started with depicting the trend of conventional family types and showed increases in solitary households and couple-only families and decreases in nuclear families in the 1990s. We further explored several alternative family types by taking into consideration the marital status of the householder and found that one-parent families and atavistic families are increasing over time. These family types were usually concealed in conventional nuclear and extended families respectively. The increasing risk of poverty for single-parent families in Taiwan was not found to have occurred in the 1990s. This might be explained by the economic shelter that stem families provide for family members experiencing hard times.
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Notes
- 1.
Although Hsu and Lin (1984) initially conducted their analysis on “single parent families” in Taiwan and regarded them as one of the main family types in 1980s, they in fact used a very broad definition for single parent families as one parent living with unmarried children of any ages.
- 2.
It is worthwhile to note that the number of one-person households might be underestimated in the surveys mainly because they are less accessible to the interviewers.
- 3.
In this paper, we classified household types by considering the head and his/her directly related relatives in the same household.
- 4.
In this paper, the measurement of being poor is based on median family disposable income adjusted by the size and the composition of the family (Duncan et al. 1995). We use an adult equivalence scale that gives weights of 1.0 to the householder, and 0.8 and 0.6 to the other adults and children in the family respectively. A household is defined as poor if its adjusted income is below 50 % of the median of the average income calculated for all households.
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Hsueh, CT. (2014). Diversity Among Families in Contemporary Taiwan: Old Trunks or New Twigs?. In: Poston, Jr., D., Yang, W., Farris, D. (eds) The Family and Social Change in Chinese Societies. The Springer Series on Demographic Methods and Population Analysis, vol 35. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-7445-2_12
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