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Socioeconomic Differences According to Family Arrangements in Chile

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Abstract

Family changes have accelerated in Chile in the last decades. Impressively, the proportion of children born outside of marriage has reached over 60%, at the same time that marriage has declined and cohabitation has increased. These changes are regularly considered indicators of a second demographic transition. This study describes the socioeconomic differences that currently exist in Chile between first-time mothers living in different family arrangements, and it asks to what extent these differences are the result of long term disadvantages passed on from the families the respondents grew up in. The data comes from a postpartum survey implemented in Santiago (N = 686 women). The results show large differences in the socioeconomic wellbeing of women in different family arrangements. Women in nuclear marriages stand far apart from any other group in terms of educational attainment, income and participation in the labor force. Cohabiters and married women in extended households enjoy a level of socioeconomic wellbeing that is similar, but not as high as that of married women in nuclear households. Cohabiters in extended households, visiting, and single mothers look alike, and are the most vulnerable women in the sample. The link between the current scenario and the family where the respondents grew up is strong. Under these circumstances, it is hard to interpret the recent demographic changes in Chilean families as a prototypical case of the SDT. The trend the country is following resembles closer the dichotomous trajectory the U.S. has followed.

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Notes

  1. The proportion of single women also went up in the rest of the age intervals, but the increase was not so large as in the 20–24 age interval.

  2. The fertility decline in Chile started in the 1960s. The TFR was 4.31 in 1960 and it is currently 1.9.

  3. The poor can use public legal clinics in order to get a divorce, which they could not use to nullify their marriages.

  4. In 2005, the year in which the divorce law started to be applied, there were 5,743 nullified marriages, whereas in 2009, there were 53, 581 divorces Identificaión, Registro Civil y de. 2010. “Estadísticas con Enfoque de Género”.

  5. Data was gathered postpartum in order to take advantage of maternity wards as natural clusters of mothers, as other studies—such as the U.S. Fragile Families and Children Wellbeing Project and the Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development—have successfully done.

  6. Though I thought that these sample exclusions would virtually eliminate very-low weight babies, in practice women in the public hospital were willing to participate and even asked to be interviewed, still in cases when the baby’s weight was extremely low, the delivery was preterm or the baby was in the newborn intensive care unit.

  7. More information abut the data collection is available form the author upon request.

  8. These figures are not so similar to the marital status distribution of women of reproductive age according to the last available census (2002). However, more recent data from the last nationally representative household survey CASEN (2009) gives similar results: in Santiago, only 35% of women of reproductive age who had a baby during the last year were married, 34% were cohabiting, and 26% were single. The differences in the proportion of women in each status between Santiago and the rest of the country are minor and are not statistically significant. These calculations are available from the author upon request, and include all women who had a baby last year, so they could be even closer to the New Chilean Families Survey if considering only women having their first baby.

  9. Multiple births are counted here as one baby.

  10. The Latin American countries included in Sapelli’s comparison are Argentina, Colombia, Mexico, and Brazil, and the developed countries, the U.S. and Spain. The U.S. data, though, comes from a study published in 1996, 10 years before the data for the Chilean rates of return was computed. Data from the other countries is closer in time.

  11. They could also be more likely to go further in educational attainment. The survey did not ask about plans for future schooling, but it asked whether the respondent was currently in school. During the pregnancy, 35% of visiting mothers were in school, versus 22% of single mothers.

  12. A likelihood ratio testing that all the coefficients associated with intact are zero was performed and rejected, indicating the effect of intact on family arrangements is significant at the .001 level.

  13. Kennedy and Bumpass used the VI wave of the National Survey of Family Growth, collected in 2002. The survey had a multistage national area probability sample, and the sample size was 7,643 women. The Kennedy and Bumpass estimates are made on the basis of all parities, not just first births.

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Acknowledgments

This research was supported by a grant from the Compton Foundation and the Population Reference Bureau (International Fellowship in Population, Environment and Human Security, 2008).

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  1. Sociology Department, Universidad Católica de Chile, Vicuña Mackena 4860, Macul, Santiago, Chile

    Viviana Salinas

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  1. Viviana Salinas
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Correspondence to Viviana Salinas.

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Salinas, V. Socioeconomic Differences According to Family Arrangements in Chile. Popul Res Policy Rev 30, 677–699 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11113-011-9206-5

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