Having explored the different ways in which social change and its effects on families have been theorised, in this chapter we turn our attention to the nature of the social change that has taken place between 1960 and the first decade of the 21st century. This provides a context for the exploration of patterns of family formation and kin relations that follows. We describe demographic, industrial and cultural change, looking particularly at the ways in which they have manifested themselves in Swansea, the setting for the research on which this book is based. We begin with an exploration of demographic change, as it is this which has led commentators to claim that ‘the family’ is in terminal decline. We then go on to look at the socioeconomic and cultural changes which, it is argued, have precipitated these changes. In the final part of the chapter we describe the research into families and social change which we carried out between 2001 and 2004 and consider some of the methodological difficulties that arise when conducting a restudy.

Structural and cultural change in the UK

Demographic change

According to Therborn, the ‘second third of the twentieth century constitutes the Marriage Age in modern Western European history. Never before, … since at least mid-sixteenth-century England … had such a large proportion of the population married’ (Therborn, 2004, 163). Indeed the 1950s have been characterised as the heyday of the male-breadwinner family (Seccombe, 1993). Since then marriage has changed from being a normative expectation for women to being one option among many, divorce rates have risen, marriage rates have fallen and cohabitation has increased. Along with this the mean age at first marriage, which fell throughout the first half of the century and bottomed out in the early 1970s, has been rising, reaching 29.7 years for men and 28.4 years for women in mid-2001 (ONS, 2002a). The rate of marriage (ONS, 2002a) and the proportion of over-16s married (ONS, 2001a) have also been falling since the early 1970s and there has been an increase in both cohabitation and lone parenting, particularly lone motherhood (Lewis, 2001b).

These trends can be related to four things. The first is the deinstitutionalisation of reproductive partnerships, that is, the increasing replacement of ‘partnership by marr iage’ by ‘partnership by cohabitation’. The second is that cohabitation is now a prelude and sequel to, as well as substitute for, marriage.