From Unmarried Cohabitation to Marriage: Does Educational Homogamy Matter?
Vol.18,No.1(2021)
New Approaches in the Methodology of Social Science Research
This article examines the association between cohabiting partners’ educational homogamy
and transition to marriage. This paper enriches previous studies with its comparative dimension to find out
if and how the association differs in countries with different meanings of cohabitation – in Austria, Poland,
and the Czech Republic. It also examines if and how the association between the transition to marriage
and educational homogamy is changing over time. Using data from the first wave of the Generations and
Gender Survey (GGS), the analysis shows that the transition to marriage depends on partners’ relative
education only in countries where cohabitation and marriage are two very different institutions – Poland
and the Czech Republic. Educational hypergamy and hypogamy are not associated with the transition
in the same way. In cohabitations where the man is more educated, the probability of marriage is half
that compared to homogamous cohabitations, whereas cohabitations with a more educated woman are
not significantly different from homogamous cohabitations. Over time, the association between relative
education and the transition to marriage has not changed.
educational homogamy; unmarried cohabitation; Generations and Gender Survey; transition to marriage
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