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Results
Co-residence Trajectories Across Three Countries
in the Wake of the Third Millennium
Co-residence trajectories were constructed using a retrospective life his-
tory calendar that recorded the dates of all co-residence changes of each
respondent from birth until the year of the interview. In order to connect
the life trajectories of individuals with their personal networks (measured
at the time of the interview), the period of observation corresponds to the
historical period 1990–2010, that is, the 20 years preceding the date of
the interviews. For all respondents, a single co-residence status was attrib-
uted to each of the 20 time units. We retained ten different statuses
according to both their statistical distribution and their sociological rel-
evance: (1) living with two parents, (2) living with one parent, (3) living
with one parent and her/his partner (step-parent), (4) living alone, (5)
living with a partner, (6) living with a partner and one’s own child(ren),
(7) living with a partner and stepchild(ren), (8) living with child(ren)
only, (9) living with friends or living with friends and relatives, and (10)
living in another situation (e.g., with kin outside the nuclear family or
with other non-kin). Sequence analysis followed by cluster analysis
allowed us to build a typology of co-residence trajectories (for a descrip-
tion of the method, see Gauthier 2013 ).
The typology of co-residence trajectories for the period 1990–2010
that is used in this chapter contains nine types.^2 Each figure presented in
Fig. 7.1 indicates the proportion of individuals in each possible state
(ordinate), for each year of life (abscissa). Table 7.1 indicates the mean
time spent in each state for each type of trajectories, as well as the corre-
sponding standard deviation. We named the first type Transition to par-
enthood (N = 457, 16% of the sample, mean age in 2010: 37), as
individuals following this type of trajectory live with both parents in the
beginning of the observation window and that most of them have become
parents twenty years later, after a short phase of solo living (1.3 years in
average) and of conjugal relationship (average 3.4 years). The second
J.-A. Gauthier et al.