(Un)married with children? Exploring marriage between parities in Hong Kong

ABSTRACT

Births outside of marriage are comparatively rare in East Asia, but numbers appear to be rising. Such fertility tends to be concentrated among lower educational and socioeconomic groups which can entrench pre-existing inequalities in systems where such ‘non-traditional' family forms are penalised. Most research in this area, however, has focused on the relationship between marriage and first birth. Using a large microdataset from Hong Kong, we explore the relationship between marriage and childbearing across the life-course. In particular, we examine the frequency of marriage between parities, and the various predictors of marrying (or not). Rather than ‘life-long’ cohabiters, we find roughly half of all couples who have a first birth outside of marriage do, in fact, marry before having their second child. The study concludes with some exploratory reasons for the apparently strong continuation of the relationship between marriage and childbearing in Hong Kong and in East Asia more generally.

KEYWORDS:

• Hong Kong
• marriage
• fertility
• Second Demographic Transition
• cohabitation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Hong Kong is a Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China. In this article, the term ‘Hong Kong’ is used to denote this territory.

2 Of this group of 1,269 we were able to link 192 to parity three. Of these 192, 4.2 per cent had a prenuptial pregnancy, while 28.1 per cent married before conception. The remaining 67.7 per cent remained unmarried at parity three. Finally, of the 130 who remained unmarried at parity three, we were able to trace 25 through to parity four (not shown in Fig.1). Of these, four couples married between parity three and four, while 21 did not.

3 From P2 to P3, the respective figures were 28.1 and 4.2 per cent. Only 21 linked births outside of marriage at P4 were recorded.

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.