Adult children’s union type and contact with mothers: A replication

Abstract

BACKGROUND Several studies show that cohabiting adult children have less frequent contact with their mothers than married adult children. We argue that these findings might be spurious due to confounding. OBJECTIVE Our aim is to replicate earlier research using more robust statistical instruments from the family of multi-level models with fixed effects, which are known to offer better control of omitted-variable bias. We also want to show the extent to which union-type effects vary across countries and by parenthood status.