With or without you. Partnership context of first conceptions and births in Hungary

Julia Mikolai, University of Southampton

In this paper, we first study how the risk of a first conception within different union types (single, cohabitation, marriage) is influenced by education and family values in Hungary and how these influences changed after the societal transition in 1990 using discrete time competing risks analysis. Then, we examine how education and family values are related to the probability of marriage before the birth of the first child for a woman, who experience non-marital conception applying logistic regression. Furthermore, we investigate whether and how partnership and fertility experiences influence changes in family values over time. For the first two analyses, we use retrospective information collected in the second wave of the Hungarian Turning Points of the Life-Course survey. The third analysis is based on a change model comparing data from the second and third wave. We find that traditional and higher educated women are more likely to conceive within marriage while liberal and lower educated women are more likely to experience a cohabiting conception. More liberal women are more likely to conceive while being single compared to their married counterparts. The influence of education on the risk of a cohabiting conception differs before and after the transition; before the transition, education has a positive gradient. Increased education and more traditional values are associated with a greater propensity to marry before the birth. Women who experience a birth within cohabitation between the two waves become more liberal than those who stay married and do not experience a birth, even when controlling for family values before these events.