Visualizing Changes in Nuptiality Patterns in Italy. An Application of the Lexis Surface

Francesca Rinesi , Istituto Nazionale di Statistica (ISTAT)
Claudia Iaccarino, Istituto Nazionale di Statistica (ISTAT)

Over the past decades, family formation behaviour has diversified in Europe. Starting from the late 1960s interrelated changes in fertility, union formation and dissolution took place in all European countries, although at a different pace. Although marriage has become less prevalent, it remains a widespread institution especially in Southern European countries. In a context of important changes both in the timing and in the volume of nuptiality, period measure may differ significantly from cohort measure. The aim of this paper is precisely to analyse nuptiality patterns in Italy across time in order to highlight the interplay between period and cohort indicators. In order to do so, we choose to use a graphical approach by visualising nuptiality patterns in Lexis surfaces. This approach make it possible to summarize a large array of data and to appreciate at a first glace both the period, the cohort and the age effects in nuptiality evolution. Lexis Surfaces of Italian female and male first nuptiality rates from 1955 to 2017 are presented as well as the plot of ratio of male to female first-nuptiality rates. The next steps of this work will include the plot of “rates of nuptiality improvement”. The latters give a clear measure of the change of nuptiality rates over time. Finally, we will compute Lexis surfaces for subnational data in order to highlight geographical differences in nuptiality patterns. Due to possible random fluctuations of data, we will consider to use smooth age-specific rates.

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 Presented in Session P3. Poster Session Migration, Economics, Environment, Methods, History and Policy