Conjugal Trajectories, Family Structures, and Social Vulnerability: A look at three generations of women in the City of Buenos Aires

Family structure and characteristics are considered an important factor in the reproduction of social inequalities. It has been documented that family structure and its stability correlate with various measures of well-being for children and adults, especially women, involved. In this paper, we use a retrospective survey for the City of Buenos Aires involving three different cohorts of women, to explore their conjugal and fertility trajectories. We describe those trajectories with a vector of variables that expand the notion of “fragile families” and use cluster analysis to characterize these trajectories. We find that our indicator of fragility correlates well with variables capturing social vulnerability both in the families of origin as well as in the women's own trajectories. Other findings include (i) an increase in "modern" lifestyles across cohorts, as captured by our indicators; (ii) a rise in educational attainment, with non-university tertiary education increasing before university education, indicating a transitional effect; and (iii) several indications of intergenerational transmission of family patterns and values – for instance, paternal absence is associated with higher teen fertility, and more "modern" lifestyles tend to be adopted by women whose mothers were the main breadwinners at home. A worrisome finding is that, according to our clustering, the number of women with high fragility has increased substantially.