Relationship quality and family transitions: The UK in international comparison

In this project we will analyse couple relationship quality and how it is related to partnership formation, dissolution, and childbearing in the UK and across Europe. With our research we are able to follow both partners over time and accompany them through the first years of their relationship and into parenthood. This provides the unique opportunity to examine why cohabiting couples marry or break up and have children.

This is an area policy makers are increasingly paying attention to, as the breakdown of relationships may not only have negative consequences for partners, but also for child wellbeing. Using data from Understanding Society, we are able to examine relationship quality along a number of specific dimensions, for example, shared interests, communication, frequency of conflict, and regret of having formed the relationship. Our analysis will allow us to assess which dimensions are most relevant for engendering good outcomes and enable policy makers to enact more targeted interventions. In this respect, our research will differ from previous studies in this field which often only use a single indicator of relationship quality.

A particular focus of our study will be on differences between marriage and cohabitation, as the latter has increasingly become a more common living arrangement for couples and a setting for childbearing. While previous research has indicated that cohabiting couples have lower relationship quality, we are interested in whether these differences diminish the longer cohabiting unions last or if they have children. Furthermore, we will examine whether cohabitors with high relationship quality have unions which are as stable as those who are married, and whether they are as likely to become parents as their married counterparts.

The survey design of Understanding Society and our use of advanced quantitative methods will allow us to gain a number of valuable insights. We will be able to examine both partners' perceptions of their relationship and whether the man or woman's view matters more for marriage, childbearing, and union dissolution. We will pay particular attention to financial problems and changes in employment to see whether disadvantaged individuals with poor relationship quality are more or less likely to have a child than those in a better economic situation. We will also consider the role of selection mechanisms that originate in early childhood - such as whether individuals come from separated families or disadvantaged backgrounds. Our longitudinal approach provides a unique opportunity to advance causal explanations regarding relationship quality and outcomes, as well as new insights into the key factors that determine partnership stability and duration.

A further aspect of our study will be a comparison between the UK and other European countries using Understanding Society and The Generations and Gender Surveys. Due to differences in survey design, such comparisons have proved difficult; however, we will create a harmonized dataset of detailed fertility and partnership histories that will be made publicly available and ensure that the UK is not left out of international comparisons in the future. This will promote comparative research across this field, as well as providing further useful insights for policy makers and stakeholders both in the UK and abroad. Moreover, the results of our research will be disseminated internationally, both with other researchers and relationship quality practitioners.

We expect that the following groups will benefit from this research:
1. Academic social scientists, including demographers, sociologists, and social policy researchers.
2. Policy analysts in government, such as the Analytical Strategy team at the Department of Work and Pensions.
3. Relationship support services and organizations with an interest in helping couples building stronger inter-personal relationships, such as Relate and OnePlusOne.
4. UK and International academics who would like to use Understanding Society to compare family dynamics in the UK with other European countries but who have been unable to due to lack of harmonized data.
The groups will benefit in the following way:
1. The results of this research will shed light on the interrelation between relationship quality and future family transitions including marriage, union dissolution, and childbearing. It will push the theoretical explanations for the development of cohabitation by formulating new perspectives on which couples marry, break up, or have a child outside of marriage. Given the rapid increase in childbearing in cohabitation, it is essential to understand why people are marrying, or which cohabiting relationships will survive. Comparing the UK with other European countries will provide additional insights into how different social, economic, and welfare state contexts shape family formation behaviour.
2. The research will fill important evidence gaps on the key areas that policy makers should address in order to make a difference in people's lives. Although our research focuses on the outcome of adult couple relationships, it implicitly applies to children's outcomes, as adult partnership dynamics are essential for understanding parental conflict. For example, our research will help us to better understand how cohabiting relationships may or may not progress towards marriage or having children, how often poor quality relationships result in pregnancy and subsequently union dissolution, and whether couples may be better off breaking up before pregnancy if in the long-term their unions will dissolve anyhow. It will also directly address the role of disadvantage in family formation, which is a key policy priority area.
3. Third sector organisations will benefit from this research because our goal is to better understand how particular dimensions of relationship quality matter in the long-term. By focusing on the specific dimensions of relationship quality, we will be able to provide suggestions on what may work when developing relationship materials and intervention programmes. We may find, for example, that having similar interests at the outset is more important than low levels of irritation with the partner. We think that these findings can then be translated to use in relationship support services.
4. The UK is often left out of important international comparisons, because Understanding Society has a different research design than the Generations and Gender Survey, the main survey programme on the family in Europe. In 2009, the PI spearheaded an effort to harmonize the partnership and fertility histories from the GGS and similar surveys, including the BHPS, in order to facilitate international comparisons. The Harmonized Histories database now includes surveys from 19 countries and is managed through the GGP team (http://www.ggp-i.org/data/harmonized-histories). Understanding Society, the follow-up to the BHPS, has never been included in the Harmonized Histories. The current project will harmonize Understanding Society, so that both UK and international researchers can easily compare family dynamics cross-nationally.