The Timing of Family Formation: Structural and Societal Factors in the Asian Context

This is a study of the timing offamily formation in four Asian countries: Taiwan, Korea, Thailand, and Malaysia. The focus is explicitly comparative. Towards this end, data from the four countries are merged. We test for the extent to which various social-structural variables operate the same way in these societies. Our results indicate that such factors as education and rural-urban origins have the same effect on the timing offamily formation in each of these countries. Once such social-structural variables are controlled, country or ethnicity still remains an important predictor of the timing of family formation. Three Confucian heritage groups-Taiwanese, Koreans, and the Malaysian Chinese-are essen-tially identical with respect to the timing offamily formation, suggesting the importance of a shared heritage. Forming the family of procreation is experienced by the vast majority of the world’s women-over 90 % in most countries. The timing of this family-formation process affects subsequent fertility, as This work has been supported by a grant from the Na-tional Science Foundation to both authors, by a grant