Value-orientations and partnership

Abstract

The aim of the paper is to analyze, for both men and women, the role played by value orientation and social condition in the choice of the various forms of partnership (marriage and cohabitation) in some European countries that represent the varying diffusion of cohabitation and are characterized by different ideational dimensions. The data analyzed using classification trees were obtained from the European Fertility and Family Surveys; the trees, identified separately for men and women in each country, were compared using a modified version of a recently proposed proximity measure, aimed at evaluating whether decisional processes differ between genders and whether they are specific to the nations examined.