Editorial: Cohabitation in Britain

Abstract

Non-marital cohabitation has always existed, but its sensitivity and informal nature made it dicult to study in the past (Gillis, 1985). However, in recent years, a number of large scale surveys have included questions on cohabitation, and the two papers in this issue, by Berrington and Diamond, and Ermisch and Francesconi, add considerably to our under-standing of cohabitation patterns in recent decades. The authors adopt complementary approaches to the analysis of cohabitation in Britain. Berrington and Diamond are con-cerned with covariates of cohabitation, and they use a birth cohort survey, the justi®ably famous 1958 National Child Development Study (NCDS), whereas Ermisch and Francesconi are concerned mainly with describing the current situation and trends by using the more recent British Household Panel Survey (BHPS). These papers are good examples of contemporary quantitative social science research and I shall concentrate on wider issues related to the nature of cohabitation, the problems of data collection on this topic and the extent to which it may actually be a state that has been given arti®cial prominence by statistical data sources and methods. Information on cohabitation has been available from national level studies in the form of retrospective partnership histories since at least the 1976 Family Formation Survey (FFS) that included women aged 16±49 years and so gave information stretching back to the 1950s. Since 1979, the General Household Survey (GHS) has been the main source of information on current cohabitation, providing data on an essentially consistent basis for nearly 20 years. The GHS also collects additional information on cohabitation current at the time of interview and on spells that ended in marriage (Kiernan and Estaugh, 1993). The GHS still does not collect information on any cohabitation spell that ended in death or breakdown, although there are proposals to extend the coverage in this area. Indeed, the FFS is still the only nationally representative source that provides information on whether the cohabita-tion spell ended by death or separation, although both the NCDS and the BHPS include all spells. All these surveys include questions on start and ®nish dates of cohabitation similar to those asked about formal marriage. The emergence of a modern form of cohabitation may in part be a product of statistical data collection, especially the increased availability of microlevel survey data. Both papers treat cohabitation and marriage as alternatives, and Berrington and Diamond use an explicit competing risks framework, although this assumption could be challenged. Cohabitation is a distinct type of relationship, àlooser bond' rather than ainformal marriage' (Schoen and Weinick, 1993). The ocial FFS report (Dunnell, 1979) rejected some reported cohabiting events on the grounds that they were not sucientlmarriage like' but were merely short-term arrangements of convenience. This distinction has become lost, and the following examples of living together are regarded as equivalent in contemporary surveys: