Housing transitions of Taiwanese young adults: intersections of the parental home and housing pathways

Abstract

In the global context, studies have found that young adults are facing increasing difficulties in accessing homeownership and delaying home-leaving. While the Western literature on housing circumstances among younger generations indicates the importance of family support, in an East Asian context, the family is particularly intertwined with housing arrangements given the cultural heritage of filial piety. To elucidate the dynamics of housing transitions, this paper adopted a holistic approach and used sequence analysis to establish distinct housing pathways in a less studied social context, Taiwan. Drawing on data from the Panel Study of Family Dynamics, apart from providing empirical evidence on the emergence of the private rented path and a decline in homeownership associated with housing inequality, this paper explored the diverse housing pathways associated with the principal platform of family support, i.e. the parental home, and found that it may function as both a familisation instrument for young adults seeking independence and negotiating leverage sustaining the filial reciprocity.

Keywords:

• Housing transition
• housing pathway
• parental home
• sequence analysis
• intergenerational co-residence

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are available from Survey Research Data Archive in Taiwan. Restrictions apply to the availability of these data, which were used under licence for this study. Data are available at https://srda.sinica.edu.tw with the permission of Centre for Survey Research, Academia Sinica.

Acknowledgement

I would like to express my gratitude to the referees for their insightful comments and suggestions.

Notes

1 The availability of social housing varies across societies with only 0.12% of the housing stock in Taiwan, 6.1% in Japan, and 30% in Hong Kong belonging to this sector (Cai, 2018).

2 The housing statistics are obtained from Trading Economics https://tradingeconomics.com/taiwan/housing-index and Taiwanese government’s Housing Information Website https://pip.moi.gov.tw/V3/E/SCRE0201.aspx

3 As the data collection of the PSFD has changed from annually to biennially after 2012, the data collection was skipped in 2013, 2015, and 2017. PSFD has managed to collect most of the information of the respondents in the skipped years in the following years, which helps this study to capture the longest possible trajectories of housing transitions with most of the information gaps of year 2013, 2015 and 2017 successfully filled by the follow-up surveys. However, information regarding the living arrangements in 2013, 2015 and 2017 was not tracked in the following years; for consistency, this study used the respondents’ status in 2014, 2016 and 2018 to establish their status in the three skipped years, respectively.

4 Contrary to the data drawn from Office for National Statistics Longitudinal Study of England and Wales, or the EU-SILC, which does not distinguish the owner of homeownership under the categories of ‘own outright’ or ‘buying’ (Coulter, 2017; Filandri and Bertolini, 2016), the PSFD differentiates the ownership between parent-owned and respondents’ self-owned tenure in the original data, which allows the separation of the ‘parent-owned’ from coresidence with parents and self-owned housing status.

5 Following studies on the family socioeconomic status in Taiwan (Chou, 2008), the education level was indicated by the parents’ educational qualifications, which was transformed into education years in the model; the class index was constructed based on Taiwan’s New Occupational Prestige and Socioeconomic Scores. Both parents’ education and class were constructed primarily based on the father’s status as the mother’s status contained more missing values.

6 For robustness, this study has followed the model setting from Köppe (2018) and run a binary logit model instead of a multinomial logit model.

7 A juxtaposition of the average lengths of housing status by demographic characteristics also shows that the 1977–1982 cohort stayed at ‘rental’ and ‘parent-owned’ residence longer (results in Appendix 4).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Yung-Han Chang

Yung-Han Chang obtained her PhD degree from the University of Manchester. Since then, she has been working in fields of living arrangements and elderly care in aged societies. She is currently an associate professor of Healthcare Management Department at the University of Kang Ning in Taiwan.