Final Report Summary - WORLDFAM (Towards a Unified Analysis of World Population: Family Patterns in Multilevel Perspective) The WorldFam project has conducted unprecedented worldwide analyses of census and survey microdata to develop a rigorous and comprehensive exploration of world family patterns in the last four decades. We have studied the relationship between societal changes (i.e. educational expansion and women’s reversal in educational attainment) and individual socio-economic characteristics on three interrelated dimensions of family life: union formation, assortative mating and intergenerational co-residence from the younger cohorts’ perspective. Our analyses were based on data from a vast new archive of international census microdaata made available by the Integrated Public Use of Microdata Series international project (IPUMS-I), with complementary use of Demographic Health Surveys (DHS), Fertility and Family Surveys (FFS), Gender and Generations Survey (GGS) and the European Survey of Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC). The WORLDFAM team has integrated data from 484 samples, 128 countries, more than 4200 regions and 600 million records, statistically representing roughly 94% of the world population. WORLDFAM demonstrated the feasibility of conducting large cross-national comparative analyses based on harmonized individual-level census microdata. This project has outlined the worldwide transformation of families including the rise of unmarried cohabitation; the effect of mass education on assortative mating, age at union formation and childbearing; the impact of the reversal in the gender gap in education on union formation, and trends and forms in intergenerational coresidence from the perspective of young couples, among other changes. It has also outlined the importance of adopting a multilevel view of social phenomena, as seldomly, individual level characteristics are enough to explain regional heterogeneity. WORLDFAM’s findings have been published in major demographic journals and will also appear in a book due to be published in 2016 on the rise of cohabitation in the Americas, geo-historical legacies and new trends. In this book we offer a continental perspective of the rise of cohabitation in the Americas using individual records from censuses and surveys distributed over 19,000 locations, from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego. The result is a panoramic view of unmarried cohabitation in which all relevant levels for understanding the cohabitation boom become visible thanks to multilevel conceptual and methodological framework. Contextual analysis has become of paramount importance and reminds us that individuals have histories, but regions have much longer histories.
