Social Networks and Family Change in Japan Revisited

Using data from the 2000 and 2009 National Surveys of Family and Economic Conditions in Japan, we examine the relationship between knowing someone engaged in “innovative” family behaviors, such as cohabitation, unmarried sex, and use of childcare by working mothers, and the attitudes toward such behaviors. We extend existing research on this topic in two ways: (a) by adding a longitudinal component to estimate a fixed-effects model that controls for the influence of unmeasured, time-invariant factors likely to be related to both knowing and attitudes; and (b) by focusing more explicitly on gender differences. We find that net of unmeasured time-invariant characteristics, changes in attitudes toward innovative family behaviors are associated with changes in knowing people engaged in them in parallel or related domains. Changes in attitudes toward marriage as necessary for men’s and women’s full lives are only related to changes in knowing for women.