Families in Western societies have become more diverse. Whereas the heterosexual married couple with children used to be the only legitimate “family”, now other arrangements such as registered partnerships, unmarried cohabitation and same-sex couples are increasingly common. Also, more and more children are born to unmarried parents and more couples remain childless.

In this study, we compare the views people hold of the family in France and the Netherlands. These two countries differ in the prevalence of certain family forms as well as in the timing with which these alternative family forms have been embedded in the law.

Using data collected in a special module on family definitions and family inclusion in the Dutch LISS panel and the French ELIPSS panel, we compare the two countries on the extent to which the label of “family” is associated with various aspects of couple relationships: the level of institutionalization of the couple, such as marriage or registered partnership, the gender composition of the couple (opposite sex versus same sex male and female couples), and the presence of children. Using a vignette design with the vignette depicting a family gathering, we aimed to ascertain (by proxy) the boundaries of inclusion by a different means.

The aim of this project is to better understand how the French and the Dutch think about the family in the face of legal and demographic developments in family formation in Europe in recent decades.

Marriage rates have been significantly decreasing and divorce rates have been significantly increasing, over the last decades in Western Europe (Eurostat, 2014). In some countries, rates of birth outside wedlock are now close to rates of birth inside wedlock. New sexual and marital tropes and norms develop, largely influenced by the medias (Bajos & Bozon, 2008). The definition of the family no longer overlaps the definition of the household. In many cases, family may be defined as a geographically scattered network of affinities more than as a kinship group. These changes invite to focus on the notions of 'doing family' (Morgan, 2011) and on the interactions between 'family configurations' (Widmer, 2010) and their social environment. Everywhere, several cultural factors affect the implementation of the kinship functions (Godelier, 2004).

Today, some single individuals prefer to raise children by themselves; others prefer to involve more than one (adult) partner in family practices. It questions monogamy as a mainstay of family and Western kinship. It also raises epistemological questions in family and kinship studies.

This presentation highlights social and cultural factors contributing to non monogamous family pathways and configurations, in Belgium, France, Luxembourg and Switzerland.

Data gathers written and recorded life stories from non-monogamous mothers and fathers, online and field observations among non-monogamous parents, and a score of articles, books, videos, and websites produced or used by the actors of non-monogamous families. The study is restricted to French-speaking informants. Data management may be discussed.

Previous results based on the Swiss Household Panel demonstrated that in the 2000s childbearing within cohabitation may be considered as an avant-garde family style rather than a marker of poverty.

However, the increase of out-of-wedlock children rose from 7% in 1995 to 22 % in 2014. Then, extra-marital births cannot anymore be considered scarce in the context of the 2010s. The presentation aims at understanding to what extend childbearing within marriage and cohabitation are still different; or contrariwise to what extend it is slightly becoming an alternative to marriage?

Based on data from the Swiss “Family and Generation survey 2013”, we investigate to what extend individuals who marry or cohabit still present different opinions and attitudes toward different aspects of life such as family attitudes, gender opinion and family organization. The particularity of this presentation is to consider the heterogeneity of cohabitation. Three different groups are distinguished: first a group of married individuals, second a group of cohabitant individuals and third, a group of individuals who declared to be divorced and having a new conjugal relationship with a partner living in the household.

Based on ordinal regression first preliminary results tend to indicate that cohabiting and married individuals differ: individuals who are cohabiting after a divorce tend to declare more negative affect and more work family life balance difficulties compared to the cohabitant and married groups. Concerning family’s attitudes, the two groups of cohabitants still seem to present less traditional attitudes on family compared to the married group.

This study offers a theoretical reflection upon the foundation of the determinants of the family ambivalence in Spain from the cultural and the institutional dimension. There are two main reasons for it: on one hand, it is confirmed the scarcity of studies that have focused their attention on this objective in the case of Spain, on the other hand, the studies carried out in the international context have confirmed the analytical effectiveness of researching on the attitude and value changes to explain the meaning and rhythm of the family changes (O'Brien, 2009; Treviño et al. 2009; Cooke, 2010; Daly and Scheiwe, 2010).

The data analysis shows that more than the half of the Spanish population living with a partner and children under the school year organise their family life according to a pattern of living arrangement closer to the traditional values than to the egalitarian ones. The predominant family models of the Spanish population is not coherent with their family models preferences as this study has proven. The results obtained show the ambivalence of the Spanish family. As a conclusion it must be highlighted that the results of the present analysis confirm the need of deepening the understanding of the Spanish family contradictory transformation.