Diversity of Young Adults' Living Arrangements: The Role of Ethnicity and Immigration

Abstract

This article explores the influence of ethnicity and immigration on the likelihood of young adults' co-residence with parents and other relatives using the 2006 Canadian census. It shows that both ethnicity and immigration affect co-residence with parents as well as with other relatives. The highest levels of co-residence are found among Southern Europeans, Asians and Latinos and among the second generation. However, South Asians exhibit the highest percentage of young adults who have already started their own family but still live with parents or relatives. Our analysis further shows that despite the importance of ethnicity as a predictor of living arrangements, its effect declines the longer the youth's family has been living in Canada.

Keywords:

• Young Adults
• Living Arrangements
• Ethnicity
• Immigration
• Canada

Acknowledgements

Support for this research was provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) and the McGill Canada Research Chair on Social Statistics and Family Change. The research was conducted at the McGill Branch of the Quebec Inter-University Centre for Social Statistics (QICSS), which provides researchers with access to detailed census and survey data collected by Statistics Canada. The opinions expressed by the authors, however, are theirs alone.

Notes

[1] Young adults living in dormitories are more likely to have been counted in their parents' household and thus form too small a group to be studied separately. In addition, the Census collected only the sex and age of individuals living in collective dwellings and no information on ethnicity and immigration.

[2] Given that Statistics Canada does not provide family-level data, we had to infer the existing relationships across members belonging to the same household only from their relationships to the main respondent (called ‘Person 1’) of the census form. In some multi-family households, for example, we could not establish if the individual described as ‘brother-in-law’ was referring to the brother of Person 1's wife or to his/her sister's spouse.

[3] An increasing number of census respondents has been selecting ‘Canadians’ as an ethnic origin since its first appearance as an example of ethnic group on the 1996 Census form. It is difficult to determine which origin these individuals identified previously. However, it seems that the response was popular among Quebecers and individuals from the third-plus generation (Jedwab 2003).

[4] This category also includes a small fraction of Americans, New Zealanders and Australians.

[5] The breakdown of these variables by gender can be obtained from the authors.