‘Family’ is a shifting concept.

What it means to be a member of a family and the expectations people

have of family relationships vary with time and across countries, making it difficult to find a universally-
agreed and applied definition. Legal alternatives to historically conventional marriage, such as
registered partnerships, have become more widespread, and national legislation has evolved to confer
more rights to unmarried couples. Alongside these new legal forms, other forms of non-marital
relationships have appeared, making it more difficult for statisticians to collect data that can be
compared across countries. In their attempt to capture and track changing family forms and
composition, demographers most often refer to the family nucleus and to private household units.
Due to differences in the timing and formal recognition of changing patterns of family formation and
dissolution, these concepts have become more difficult to operationalise. Analysts of demographic
statistics therefore have access to relatively few complete and reliable datasets with which to make
comparisons over time and between and within countries. It can be observed, however, that the
number of marriages is decreasing and the number of divorces is increasing, although these trends
may be due in part to the ageing of the population. In addition, more and more children are born to
unmarried women, and the countries with the highest extramarital birth rates are often also those
with the highest fertility rates.

7.1. FEWER MARRIAGES, MORE DIVORCES

Marriage as recognised by the law in each country has long been considered to signal family formation.
This section examines the trends in family formation and dissolution though marriage and divorce. In
2007, 2.4 million marriages and 1.2 million divorces took place in the EU-27. The crude marriage rate,
i.e. the number of marriages per 1 000 inhabitants, was 4.9, and the crude divorce rate was 2.1 per 1
000 inhabitants.