UCLA

Across Europe, the 1960s to 1990s was a period of major economic transformation and change in the normative context of women’s work. This coincided with a series of dramatic demographic changes— including delays in marriage, potential increases in never-marrying, and “delayed adulthood”— in which individuals entered work and family roles at later ages. In contexts of macro-level economic change and increases in women’s work, Oppenheimer theorized that the relationship between individuals’ economic prospects and marriage had changed over this time, disproportionately affecting men with the weakest economic prospects and increasing marital inequality. The Theory of Social Stress and the Stress Process Model provide frameworks with which to understand how young persons’ delayed adulthood transitions may have a mental health consequence for their older parents who are instrumentally and emotionally involved in their lives. In three dissertation chapters, I empirically and comparatively explore these theories across a number of European countries. In Chapter 1, I utilize event-history techniques to investigate change over time in the relationship between individuals’ economic prospects and marriage timing for men and women born between 1938 and 1959. In Chapter 2, I investigate change over time in the relationship between economic prospects and ever-marrying for men and women born between 1938 and 1970. In Chapter 3, I explore if adult offspring’s delayed adulthood transitions are significantly associated with parental depressive symptomatology.

Broadly speaking, I find support for these theories. With respect to marriage formation, my results suggest that marriage timing is a distinct phenomenon from ever-marrying. In Chapter 1, I find that in contexts where women’s work was normative from the 1960s to 1980s, men’s labor market standing was less important for marriage timing, while women’s labor market standing mattered for marriage timing. Men with weaker labor market positions experienced reduced likelihoods of marrying younger over this historical time in a number of countries. Moreover, my results suggest that country-specific labor market policies, rather than broad-sweeping economic instability, may better explain the changing relationship between economic prospects and marriage timing. In Chapter 2, and in contrast to findings for marriage timing, I find that men’s education is strongly important for ever marrying, regardless of gender equality levels across Europe. However, similar to findings for marriage timing, gender equality appears to matter for the economic underpinnings of ever-marrying among women. Also similar to findings for marriage timing, men with the poorest education experienced absolute reductions in their prospects for ever-marrying from the 1960s to 1990s. Change in the relationship between economic prospects and ever-marrying is only observed in countries that experienced dramatic macro-level change with the end of communism. In Chapter 3, I find that delayed adulthood does have a significant association with parents’ depressive symptomatology across Europe, with a depressive effect of offspring unemployment being the most commonly observed. Further, parental depression appears more sensitive to negative event stressors which capture offspring loss of a formerly-held adulthood role, rather than “non-event” stressors which capture anticipation of offspring occupying an adult role in the future. My findings also indicate that country context, such as unemployment rates and divorce rates, may inform the relationship between adult offspring unemployment or divorce and parental depressive symptomatology. In all three chapters, the importance of economic prospects in influencing people’s lives, either for demographic outcomes such as marriage, or for mental health outcomes such as depressive symptomatology, is widely observed across Europe.