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Article Information:
Title:
Household composition in post-socialist Eastern Europe
Author(s):
Patricia Ahmed, Rebecca Jean Emigh
Journal:
International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy
Year:
2005
Volume:
Issue:
Page:
9 - 41
ISSN:
0144-333X
DOI:
10.1108/01443330510791117
Publisher:
Emerald Group Publishing Limited
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Abstract:
Two perspectives provide alternative insights into household composition in contemporary Eastern Europe. The first stresses that individuals have relatively fixed preferences about living arrangements and diverge from them only when they cannot attain their ideal. The second major approach, the adaptive strategies perspective, predicts that individuals have few preferences. Instead, they use household composition to cope with economic hardship, deploy labor, or care for children or the elderly. This article evaluates these approaches in five post-socialist East-European countries, Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and Russia, using descriptive statistics and logistic regression. The results suggest that household extension is common in these countries and provide the most evidence for the adaptive strategies perspective. In particular, the results show that variables operationalizing the adaptive strategies perspective, including measures of single motherhood, retirement status, agricultural cultivation, and poverty, increase the odds of household extension.
Keywords:
Eastern Europe, Household composition
Article Type:
Research paper