Couples between co-residence and living apart together. Multi-residence of partners and part-time couples: the case of France

Laurent Toulemon, Institut National d'Études Démographiques (INED)
Sophie Pennec, Institut National d'Études Démographiques (INED)

With the increasing diversity of family situations, more people now “usually” live in more than one dwelling. In two previous papers, we estimated the proportion of people living in two dwellings in Australia and France, and the transition probabilities into and out from multi-residence, at the individual level. The aim of this paper is to identify not only cohabiting couples and living-apart-together couples, but also “part-time-cohabiting couples”, where partners are partly living together, one or both of them commuting between different households. We base our paper on a large-scale survey, the EU-SILC in France, where people are followed annually. We use the three first waves, which took place in 2004, 2005 and 2006. The significance of “part-time cohabiting couple” and living-apart-together situations heavily depends on whether they are long-lasting or transitory. We describe the transitions between the different couple situations, in order to better understand their dynamics.