Italian Global Families: Changes over Time

Giorgio Di Gessa , University College London
Paola Di Giulio, Vienna Institute of Demography of the Austrian Academy of Sciences
Francesca Fiori, University of Strathclyde
Cecilia Reynaud, Università Roma Tre

Migration has long shaped Italy’s demographics, with recent outflows driven mainly by economic reasons. Although such emigration raises questions about non-economic family consequences, such as intergenerational exchanges, few studies to date have examined how emigration has impacted family structures and how these demographic signals of having relatives abroad vary by relationship and age. This study aims to address this research gap using the 1998 and 2016 ISTAT Family and Social Subjects Surveys (response rates >75%), restricted to Italy-born respondents. Harmonised questionnaires allow us to identify for household members whether their parents, siblings, children, and grandchildren are alive and where they reside (with non-coresident kin ordered by distance). We report weighted prevalences of kin abroad by age (18–34, 35–49, 50–64, 65+) and test changes over time using pooled regression models. Preliminary results suggest that the presence of kin alive has changed over time, reflecting changes in fertility and longevity. Moreover, we find that younger cohorts of Italians in 2016 were more likely to have siblings and parents living abroad compared to 1998. In contrast, those aged 50 and older were more likely in 2016 than in 1998 to have children and grandchildren living abroad. For example, among those aged 25–34, 2.4% in 1998 had a sibling abroad, vs. 4.4% in 2016, with the prevalence higher among those with two or more siblings. Findings provide a baseline for assessing implications for support and intergenerational exchanges for families with members living abroad.

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 Presented in Session 57. Flash Session Assortive Mating, Education and Social Class