The Influence of Personal Networks on Decision Making About Family Formation: Has It Changed?

Abstract

For centuries, family formation has been associated with the reproduction of family members and the preservation of the socioeconomic status quo inherited by the family (Becker 1993 [1981]). Eventually, strategies, including social norms and control mechanisms of family formation, were developed and integrated into historic European societies (Bourdieu 1976; Lesthaeghe 1980). According to Malthus (1798), matrimonial behaviour depended on the interrelation of two control systems: positive control meaning socioeconomic restrictions to individual choices (i.e., competition in the labour market, unemployment, poverty, others) and preventive control meaning the establishment of social norms and social control (i.e., early marriage or its postponement, conscious celibacy, large families, childlessness, others).