Research has shown that married individuals live longer lives than unmarried women and men. A smaller number of studies have included non-marital cohabitation and have found that their mortality falls between the married and other unmarried groups. There are indications that the cohabiting population is diverse in terms of mortality risk, yet very little is known about how the association is related to age and stages of the life course. Sweden is a forerunner in family trends, and this is the first study that examines cohabitation and mortality in a Swedish context. Using Swedish register data for the years 2012–2017, we investigated how different partnership statuses are related to mortality for men and women at different ages (N = 5,572,011). We also examine whether the association between cohabitation and mortality is similar after accounting for family-of-origin effects through the use of a sibling comparison design. Our findings confirmed the notion of cohabiters as a diverse group whose relative mortality risk differs depending on the timing of cohabitation. Never-married cohabiters had a mortality risk similar to married couples at younger ages and a gradually increased risk with age. Divorced and widowed cohabiters exhibited an age gradient in the opposite direction. Future research should consider how the context of cohabitation changes across the life course.

Scholars agree that educational gradients in fertility vary by context, with indications of more positive educational gradients in northern and western Europe since the turn of the century. However, despite theoretical and empirical research on rural-urban differences in fertility, our understanding of subnational regional variation and urban-rural differences in the relationship between education and fertility remains limited. Utilising large-scale administrative data from seven countries (Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, the Netherlands, Norway and Sweden) at around the turn of the century, this study identifies substantial subnational regional differences in the association between female education on the one hand, and birth hazards or synthetic parity progression ratios on the other. With respect to urbanisation, we find that higher shares of foreign-born women in more urbanised populations are associated with more negative educational gradients in fertility. Hence, we present a first descriptive step towards the development of a research agenda to explain regional and urban-rural variation in educational gradients in fertility.

We examine the prevalence of gender transitions in Sweden over time and document the sociodemographic characteristics of people transitioning in different periods. Using administrative data covering the transgender population from 1973 through 2020, we analyze two common events in a gender transition: the earliest diagnosis of gender incongruence and the change of legal gender. Our research note presents three main findings. First, the measured prevalence rates of diagnoses and legal gender changes are relatively low in all periods, although they have increased substantially since the early 2010s. Second, the recent increase in transition prevalence is most pronounced among people in early adulthood; in particular, young transgender men drive an increase in overall transition rates through 2018, followed by moderate declines in 2019 and 2020. Third, transgender men and women have substantially lower socioeconomic outcomes than cisgender men and women, regardless of the age at which they transition or the historical period. They are also considerably less likely to be in a legal union or reside with children. These findings highlight the continued economic and social vulnerability of the transgender population.

It is often acknowledged that public policies can constrain people's procreative opportunities, in some cases even infringing their procreative rights. However, a topic that is not often discussed is how the procreative choices of one generation can affect the procreative opportunities of later generations. In this article, we argue that the demographic fact that childbearing above the replacement fertility level is eventually unsustainable supports two constraints on universal procreation rights: a compossibility constraint and an egalitarian constraint. We explore the implications of these two constraints and suggest that there are reasons to think of procreative opportunity as a finite resource that can be distributed more or less equally across generations. We also briefly discuss possible ways of meeting demands of intergenerational justice with respect to procreative opportunity.

An exten sive lit er a ture has exam ined the rela tion ship between birth spac ing and sub se quent health out comes for par ents, par tic u larly for moth ers. However, this research has drawn almost exclu sively on obser va tional research designs, and almost all stud ies have been lim ited to adjusting for observ able fac tors that could con found the rela tion ship between birth spac ing and health out comes. In this study, we use Nor we gian reg is ter data to exam ine the rela tion ship between birth spac ing and the num ber of gen eral prac ti tioner con sul ta tions for moth ers' and fathers' phys i cal and men tal health con cerns imme di ately after child birth (1-5 and 6-11 months after child birth), in the medium term (5-6 years after child bear ing), and in the long term (10-11 years after child bear ing). To exam ine short term health out comes, we esti mate indi vid ual fixed-effects mod els: we hold con stant fac tors that could influ ence par ents' birth spacing behav ior and their health, com par ing health out comes after differ ent births to the same par ent. We apply sib ling fixed effects in our anal y sis of medium- and long-term out comes, hold ing con stant moth ers' and fathers' fam ily back grounds. The results from our ana ly ses that do not apply indi vid ual or sib ling fixed effects are con sis tent with much of the pre vi ous lit er a ture: shorter and lon ger birth inter vals are asso ci ated with worse health out comes than birth inter vals of approx i ma tely 2-3 years. Estimates from indi vid ual fixed-effects mod els sug gest that par tic u larly short inter vals have a mod est neg a tive effect on mater nal men tal health in the short term, with more ambig u ous evi dence that par tic u larly short or long inter vals might mod estly influ ence short-, medium, and longterm phys i cal health out comes. Overall, these results are con sis tent with small to neg li gi ble effects of birth spac ing behav ior on (nonpreg nancyrelated) parental health outcomes.

The influence of kin on various outcomes is heavily debated. However, kinship size itself conditions the probability of potential effects. Socio-economic gradients in the prevalence, variance, and types of kin are, therefore, a vital aspect of the functions of kin. Unfortunately, these parameters are largely unknown. We used Swedish register data to enumerate consanguine and in-law kin across the life course of the 1975 birth cohort. We calculated differences in kinship size between this cohort’s income quartiles and educational groups. We decomposed how specific kin relations, generations, and demographic behaviours contributed to these differences. Among low socio-economic status (SES) groups, higher fertility in earlier generations resulted in more kin compared with high-SES groups. Low-SES groups had more horizontal consanguine kin, while high-SES groups had more in-laws. Lower fertility and higher union instability among low-SES men substantially narrowed SES differences in kinship size. Kinship size varied substantially within SES groups.

We studied how individuals’ ethnolinguistic affiliation relates to the ethnolinguistic structure of kinship in contemporary Finland, a society in which Finnish-speaking and Swedish-speaking ethnolinguistic groups have coexisted for centuries and mixed marital unions are common. Using multigenerational data from the population register, we determined how the ethnolinguistic registration of children born in 1990–2015 relates to three generations of ancestors. We created a family tree that links children to their parents, four grandparents and eight great grandparents. Our intention was to both map the ethnolinguistic background of young people and predict a child’s affiliation based on their ancestry. The data revealed that ethnolinguistic affiliation is a more fluid and complex feature than expected when assessed only through child and parental characteristics. We found substantial diversity in ethnolinguistic background within the Swedish-speaking minority group, while most individuals in the Finnish-speaking majority group had a uniform background. We identified three types of bias in the ethnolinguistic affiliation of mixed-origin children: a matrilineal bias, a kinship majority bias and a Swedish ethnic minority bias. The analyses advanced our understanding of how the size of minority groups can shrink even when most couples in mixed unions favour minority group affiliation for their children.

This study investigates two concurrent trends across Europe and North America: the increasing instability of parental unions and men’s rising contributions to household work. Because children have almost universally resided with their mothers and it is difficult for non-residential fathers to maintain any levels of care work, union dissolutions have potentially slowed societal increases in gender equality. A new family form—50/50 living arrangements—has begun to challenge our understanding of the consequences of union dissolution. Since 50/50 residence requires fathers to take full care responsibility for the child half of the time—something few partnered fathers do—it may even push parents into a more egalitarian division of care work. We have studied care work using Swedish administrative data on parents’ leave from work to care for a sick child. We have created a panel of leave-sharing for children aged 2–11, and use an event-study design to estimate the causal effect of dissolution on the sharing of sick-child leave. The results show that in parental unions dissolving today, the dissolution leads to an increase in fathers’ share of sick-child leave. Whereas union dissolutions have for decades been slowing the gender revolution in Sweden, they are now accelerating it.

We theoretically explore the interrelations between population (P), affluence (A) and technology (T) for various environmental impacts (I) using IPAT-type modelling. To illustrate the differences across environmental dimensions, climate and land use impacts are modelled. We use middle-of-the-road projections for population and per capita income and different forecasting methods for technology, including extrapolations of historical trends, models based on stochastic IPAT (STIRPAT) and predictions in the literature. The different approaches are compared within the IPAT framework. We also explore the consequences of alternative trajectories for P, A and T, and we discuss the implications of these trajectories for reaching global goals based on our modelling. The findings are analysed in light of three theories in environmental sociology, each of which places a different emphasis on the different components of IPAT. We argue that the large amount of technological mitigation assumed in many forecasts makes affluence and population relatively irrelevant for climate change. However, we also consider it likely that both factors will be determinants of land use impact in the 21st century.

We use longitudinal data on religious affiliation in Finland to examine childbearing behavior. All analyses are based on detailed fertility information from the Finnish national register of each person’s religious denomination for men and women born in 1956–1975. We identify higher fertility according to parity among members of the Evangelical Lutheran state church and other Protestant churches, and lower fertility among individuals with no religious affiliation. Most other religious groups—Orthodox Christians, Jews, Muslims, and adherents of Eastern religions—have intermediate levels of fertility. We also find that religious converts, that is, those observed with more than one religious denomination over their life course, typically are similar to the non-converts of the group they convert to, though with more distinct deviations from the Finnish population. Women show larger differences by religious affiliation than men. We find the largest differences across religions when we examine the proportion of childless men and women. Overall, differences between religious groups are rather modest, and childbearing patterns are quite similar. Our results provide, to our knowledge, the first examination of religion and fertility using national-level longitudinal data.