Most people coreside with other kin in private households while others live alone. The incidence of coresidence with kin and solo living varies noticeably across societies. Scholars have long theorized about the role of modernization and cultural change for living arrangements, suggesting a trend toward the nuclearization of households (coresidence only with primary kin) or solo living as societies attain higher levels of development. There is little empirical evidence about global variations in living arrangements and about how such variations unfold at different levels of development. Here we address these fundamental questions. Using IPUMS census microdata for 279 samples and 90 countries, we develop a new metric for assessing the part of the lifetime a person can expect to reside with primary kin, nonprimary kin, or alone assuming exposure rates, from birth to death, to the living arrangements observed in a given year. Results show that coresidence patterns differ substantially across societies, with exposure to primary kin alone and to solo living substantially higher at higher levels of development (as measured with Human Development Index [HDI]). They also reveal a sustained decline in coresidence with nonprimary kin and/or with others nearly everywhere, supporting the idea of an increasing importance of nuclear living arrangements. This trend is most pronounced at medium levels of HDI. At very high levels of development, nuclear family coresidence tends to be stalling or is in decline in favor of more time spent living alone and, rather unexpectedly, to a modest increase in exposure to nonprimary kin within the household. We suggest different interpretations for these results.

中文翻译：

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世界各地居住安排的趋势

大多数人在私人家庭中与其他亲属住在一起，而其他人则独自生活。不同社会中与亲属同住和单独生活的发生率存在显着差异。长期以来，学者们一直在理论上探讨现代化和文化变革对生活安排的作用，并提出随着社会达到更高水平的发展，出现家庭核心化（仅与主要亲属共同居住）或独居的趋势。关于生活安排的全球差异以及这种差异如何在不同发展水平上显现的经验证据很少。在这里，我们解决这些基本问题。利用 IPUMS 人口普查微观数据，涵盖 90 个国家/地区的 279 个样本，我们开发了一种新指标，用于评估一个人在一生中预期与主要亲属、非主要亲属或单独居住的时间（假设暴露率），从出生到死亡，再到在世的人。特定年份观察到的安排。结果表明，不同社会的共同居住模式存在显着差异，单独与主要亲属接触和单独生活的发展水平较高（根据人类发展指数 [HDI] 衡量）。它们还揭示了与非主要亲属和/或几乎所有地方的其他人的共同居住持续下降，支持了核生活安排日益重要的观点。这种趋势在人类发展指数处于中等水平时最为明显。在发展水平非常高的情况下，核心家庭的共同居住往往会停滞或下降，有利于花更多的时间独居，而且出乎意料的是，与家庭内非主要亲属的接触会略有增加。我们对这些结果提出不同的解释。