World Family Map 2015


NO ONE BEST WAY: WORK, FAMILY, AND HAPPINESS THE WORLD OVER

IFS Website
Institute for Family Studies

Executive Summary

by Mindy E. Scott, W. Bradford Wilcox, Renee Ryberg, and Laurie DeRose 

The World Family Map Project monitors the global health of the family by tracking 16 indicators of family structure, family socioeconomics, family processes, and family culture in multiple countries around the world. Each annual report of the project shares the latest data on these indicators, as well as an original essay focusing on one important aspect of contemporary family life. In both the indicators and the essay, we share the highest-quality data available for countries that are representative of each region of the world. Scholars around the globe serve as advisors and analysts for the project, stimulating a large community of researchers to gather new data and conduct innovative studies on families and children.

This third edition of the World Family Map, which is sponsored by Child Trends, the Social Trends Institute, and a range of international educational and nongovernmental institutions, provides updated indicators of family well-being worldwide. The World Family Map indicators show that there are distinct family patterns across regions, and also variation within regions. Families are changing around the world. Marriage is becoming less common. Severe economic hardships, including extreme poverty and undernutrition, are diminishing, yet remain real struggles for a significant minority of the world’s population. There are many other patterns to discover in the report. Each country and region has unique strengths to offer as an example for others to follow, and each also has areas of life where families face ongoing challenges.

This year’s essay examines how couples around the globe split up work and family responsibilities. International data reveal there is no one dominant pattern for dividing paid and domestic work in any world region. Moreover, no particular approach to the division of labor is consistently linked to higher levels of happiness among parents in most parts of the world, although parents who have a partner with whom to divide the labor report more happiness than parents who do not have a partner. We summarize selected findings from this year’s family indicators below. 

Family Structure

Family structure refers to whom a child lives with, including parents and other family members, and the relationships between them.

Family Socioeconomics

The economic conditions people experience in childhood can exercise a large influence on their development. The indicators in this section include poverty, undernourishment, parental education and employment, and public benefits for families.

Family Processes

Family processes describe how families operate: how family members interact with one another, how often they spend time together, and whether they are satisfied with their family lives. These processes can influence the lives of individual family members, in either positive or negative directions. 

Family Culture

The family culture indicators monitor national attitudes and values on family issues. They describe the cultural climate in which children grow up.

Essay on Work, Family, and Happiness the World Over

This year’s essay further highlights the diversity of family processes and family culture within and across countries. Building on the previous World Family Map Project essays, which focused on the consequences of family structure for, respectively, children’s educational attainment and health, this year’s essay studies some of the factors that influence family well-being. Data on 32 countries from the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) 2012 survey on Family and Changing Gender Roles were used to examine how married and cohabiting couples with children divide market and household work and whether couples’ happiness depends on this division of labor. Specifically, the essay aims to:

  1. document how couples with children divide labor force participation, housework, and child care;
  2. explore whether individual factors like age, education, and religiosity affect how couples divide labor in the same way across societies or whether the influence of these factors depends on region-specific contexts; and
  3. assess whether and how the division of labor is associated with happiness.

As the essay explains in greater depth, our findings suggest that there is no one dominant pattern for dividing paid and domestic work across the globe. Instead, every region is home to a variety of ways of sharing the total family workload. Men and especially women with children do more domestic work than their peers without children. Yet having children is more associated with a traditional division of labor in richer countries than in lower-income ones. Finally, the division of paid and domestic labor among couples with children is largely irrelevant to the levels of happiness they report.

We know from research and previous WFM findings that the experiences of children in different family structures are diverse, and children can flourish in all kinds of families, including single-parent families. With respect to reported happiness, this year’s edition of the World Family Mapfound that how couples with children divide labor does not seem to influence the levels of happiness they report, except in Eastern and Western Europe. However, there are differences in levels of reported happiness between single parents and couples with children: couples report higher levels of happiness. 

This report monitors the strength of the family globally, and provides updated indicators of family structure, family socioeconomics, family processes, and family culture. Together, the indicators and the essay present findings that can be used by policymakers, service providers, and others to identify opportunities to help families flourish, from maintaining family stability, reducing family poverty, and alleviating undernourishment to studying the diverse family processes and cultural norms that help to shape people’s everyday lives.

Next: Spanish Translation

Click to Navigate to Section

Download the Report