The article presents an overview of trends in cohabitation and marriage in Britain over several decades, using a consistent set of retrospective histories from the General Household Survey 1979–2007. Time‐trends are presented, for men and women, of: the experience of different types of partnership by specified ages, the frequency of premarital cohabitation, the average time spent in different types of partnership, the timing of life course transitions, and the outcome of cohabitation and marriage at the fifth and tenth anniversaries.

Authors and Affiliations

1. ESRC Centre for Population Change, University of Southampton,

   Éva Beaujouan & Máire Ní Bhrolcháin

This article uses a recently proposed measure, the overall replacement ratio or ORR, to assess the extent to which migration alters intergenerational replacement within the United Kingdom

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