Studying cohabitations with the French Longitudinal Survey Vianney Costemalle, Sébastien Durier, INSEE For a long time in France, most of the people who entered in a relationship were getting married before living under the same roof. Since the 1970's, behaviours in that domain have rapidly changed : it is no more uncommon to live with a partner without being married (at the beginning of the relationship at least) (Costemalle, 2015) and since 1999 couples can also choose a civil contract, « PACS » in French, instead of marriage. As a matter of fact, in France, according to the survey on Family and Housing 2011, 76 % of cohabiting unions are marriages, 4 % are civil solidarity pacts and 20 % are consensual unions 1 (Insee, 2015). But how many new unions are formed each year and what do happen to them over time ? How the nature of the union is evolving throughout the relationship ? For marriages and civil pacts, we can take advantage of administrative data to evaluate each year the number of new unions and dissolutions (Haut Conseil à la Famille, 2014) whereas for consensual unions we had no other choice until recently than using surveys with relative small sample sizes (eg EU-SILC). Fortunately, a new source is now available : the French longitudinal survey, called « Échantillon démographique permanent » (EDP), is a longitudinal survey of individuals which permanently concerns 4% of the French population (approximately 2,8 millions of individuals). It is based on several data sources, namely census data, civil register, electoral register, panel of employees and income tax return data, which are all combined in one database (Durier, 2016). New information can then be deduced by crossing data which were already available separetely but which could not be merged, and by comparing, at the individual level, data at different points in time. 1) A new source to study cohabiting unions The EDP exists since the 1968 census, but was recently enhanced by adding income tax return data 2 . Those data, combined with the census data offers new perspectives for studying unions. In France, census occurs every year on a sample of 14% of the whole population. As a consequence, within the EDP, there are every year 14% of the individuals for whom we have both their income tax return and their census responses. Moreover, for one given individual we usually don’t have census information every year, but only every few years. On the one hand, with the income tax we can know if people are married or 1 Consensual unions is also frequently named as « cohabitation without marriage ». Non cohabiting unions, whatever the legal status, are not in the scope of the article. 2 The EDP enhanced with income tax data has already been used in a recent publication which analyses who from the two partners stay in the housing after a break up of marriage or civil pact (Durier, 2017).
bound by a civil pact, and if they are, since which date. This source also provides identifying informations about the other adults in the dwelling who declare incomes. On the other hand, the census gives information about whether or not the individual lives in couple and whether or not he/she is married (and starting from 2015, if he/she is bound by a civil pact). Combining the two pieces of information produces a perfect source for the study of cohabiting couples. First of all, EDP is able to estimate every year (starting from 2011) the stocks of people who are married, bound by a civil pact and who are in consensual union. If we benchmark the distribution of people in consensual union according to the age against the distribution obtained with the Family and Housing survey of 2011 3 , we find a very similar pattern which lets us think that the quality of the data and the methodology are very good (figure 1). In total there are approximately 6 millions people living in couple without being married or bound by a civil pact in France. In the French Longitudinal Survey we identify about 35.000 individuals who are in this situation each year which is a decent sample size and not that far away from the sample size of the Family and Housing survey (48.000 individuals in consensual unions). Figure 1 : Number of individuals in a consensual union in 2011 by age. Scope : France without Mayotte 3 The Family and Housing Survey is the best survey to measure the family structures in France. Unfortunately, it's been carried out approximately every ten years.
Source : Echantillon démographique permanent 2015, Insee-Dgfip and Survey Family and Housing 2011, Insee. 2) Flows of union formation and dissolution on a yearly basis. Unlike cross-section data, it is possible with the French longitudinal panel to follow through time the evolution of a situation at the individual level. As it had been noticed before, individuals don’t respond to the census every year, and as a matter of fact we cannot determine every year for every people of the sample if they are living in couple or not. But thanks to the income tax data which are annual we can still monitor consensual unions evolutions. For that purpose, we use identifying informations of the partner which are available every year in the income tax data. We are then able to determine if people, from one year to the next, start a new consensual union. We can thus estimate the number of couple formations by cohabitation without direct marriage or civil pact (figure 2). It appears that more than half a million new consensual unions are set up every year in France 4 . It is much more than the number of unions which are turn into a marriage or a civil pact the same year, and so it means that a large part of consensual unions will never be bounded by a contract (marriage or civil pact). Figure 2 : flows of union formation Scope : France without Mayotte Source : Echantillon démographique permanent 2015, Insee-Dgfip In the same way, we can estimate the number of separations among cohabiting unions (figure 3). Consensual union dissolutions outnumber by a large amount dissolutions among people who are married or bounded by a civil pact. Because the latter are four times more numerous than the former, it appears that separation rate is much higher within cohabitation than marriages or civil unions. 4 We cannot differentiate between first unions and higher ranks unions.
Figure 3 : flows of union dissolution Scope : France without Mayotte Source : Echantillon démographique permanent 2015, Insee-Dgfip 3) The dynamic of unions With the EDP, we are not restraint to a comparison of the situation of individual from a year to the other, but it's also possible to follow up the individual throughout their entire live. For example, it's possible to follow a cohort of individual who engaged themselves in a consensual union in the year 2011 and in the following years determine if they stay with the same partner in a cohabiting union, if they get married, if they contract a civil pact or if they are no longer living together (by cause of death or separation)(Figure 4). Figure 4 : cohort of individuals from consensual unions formed in 2011 Scope : France without Mayotte, individuals who began a consensual union during the year 2011. Source : Echantillon démographique permanent 2015, Insee-Dgfip Thus four years after the union formation, only half of the individuals are still living in a consensual union, whereas one quarter has moved toward a “legal” status (marriage and civil pact in equal part) and one quarter no longer lives with their partner. For now only four years of following are available, but the robustness of the preliminary results are very promising and each annual future release of the database will enhance the longitudinal aspect. In fact, one of the strength of the EDP is that attrition is rather small. It suffers attrition mainly by cause of death or moving abroad. Attrition caused by “non-response” is
smaller (less than 5% percent) and is not increasing with time. 4) Union break-up involving children Having a better insight into consensual unions is also of great value for assessing the consequences of dissolution for children. As married couples have to follow the legal procedure of divorce to break-up, what happens to children has been monitored for a long time and there is a broad literature on consequences of divorce. But, giving the growing importance of cohabitation without marriage, it appears relevant to deal with the same issues for unmarried union dissolutions (civil pacts and consensual unions). In fact, the lack of knowledge on this subject was strongly pointed out in 2016 by the National committee of statistical information, the CNIS, (Thelot, 2016). When a divorce happened, in two third of the cases, children were involved, and on average on the period 2011-2014, there are 150.000 children that live the divorce of their parents (Figure 5). For civil pacts or consensual unions, there is slightly more dissolutions without children. Nonetheless and given the large number of dissolutions of that type, there are around 230.000 children involved each year in the separation of their unmarried parents 5 . Figure 5 : Presence of children in union dissolutions (average 2011-2014) Scope : France without Mayotte 5 Both parents are not compulsorily biological parent : some children live in stepfamilies.
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