Seminar Series: Family Disruption in Sweden: New Possibilities and Preliminary Results from Administrative Registers

"Family Disruption in Sweden: New Possibilities and Preliminary Results from Administrative Registers" Nordic data registers are a source of longitudinal life histories for entire populations. Particularly problematic for family scholars is the fact that no register exists for cohabiting partnerships. A new database, Sweden in Time: Activities and Relations (STAR), includes information to estimate cohabitation, and thus separation of cohabiters, when partners have a child together. Although the registers have some gaps and inconsistencies, they provide estimates of non-union and non-marital births, as well as parental separation, that are reasonably consistent with estimates from survey data. Preliminary analyses show the well-established negative association between maternal education but provide little evidence of increasing educational differentials in the context of the 1990s economic crisis.