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A recent research showed that in Italy the gap in family life satisfaction of cohabitors relative to spouses has eroded over the last two decades, and vanished in more recent years. Starting from those results, our aim is to further investigate the reduction of that gap by disentangling the effects due to age, period and cohort on family life satisfaction, in order to provide new evidence of the dynamics of, and heterogeneity in, family satisfaction across the life course over the last 20 years in Italy.

We use data from 20 years of Aspects of Daily Life surveys, from 1993 to 2012, by applying the Hierarchical Age-Period-Cohort (HAPC) approach. Preliminary results show that the age effect is curvilinear, showing first an increase and then a decrease in dissatisfaction in family life across life course. Period effects show an increasing trend in family dissatisfaction. As for cohorts, a moderate decrease in the level of dissatisfaction is depicted for the cohorts born in 1960-1979 relative to the after-war cohorts, whereas the generation X shows a modest increase in family dissatisfaction. A differentiated pattern over the time also appears as for the variations of family life satisfaction between cohabitors and spouses.

marriage; cohabitation; age-period-cohort model