The Conceptual and Empirical Challenges of Estimating Trends in Union Stability: Have Unions Become More Stable in Britain?

Abstract

This chapter provides an overview of the conceptual and empirical challenges that arise once measuring union stability. Conceptually, the chapter discusses different ways of defining unions and what each way implies in terms of measurement. For the purposes of this chapter, union stability is defined as the stability of both marriages and co-residential unions. Available data sources are discussed as well as their possible biases. Empirically, the chapter compares two data sources from Britain to show that there are serious challenges to be overcome when using survey data to estimate trends in union stability. Survey data possibly overestimates union stability due to selective non-response and prospective surveys do not report many unions that existed according to retrospective data. Good news comes from a comparison of two retrospective sources which provide relatively consistent estimates of trends in union stability. If retrospective information is indeed to be trusted, union stability has been decreasing across cohorts (1974-1999), but this development appears to have stalled for the most recent cohort formed in 2000-2004. A lack of recent data, however, prevents us from knowing whether this trend has continued , underlining the need to invest in the repeated collection of retrospective union histories.