A Dirty Look From The Neighbors. Does Living In A Religious Neighborhood Prevent Cohabitation?

The aim of the paper is to provide insights into how religion influences the family formation process. In particular, we analyze the impact of a neighborhood context religiosity on an individual decision to enter cohabitation. We use the data on two European societies where secularization and individualization have not yet reached momentum: Italy and Poland. We combine the empirical evidence from both qualitative and quantitative research. The qualitative research provides an in-depth understanding of the mechanisms through which the neighborhood may affect the individual decisions on union formation. By means of quantitative multilevel analyses we test how strong these mechanisms are in the general population. The qualitative analysis identified several mechanisms related, among others, to a lack of social recognition for cohabiting couples and to ostracism in the neighborhood. The quantitative outcomes confirmed that individuals living in social environment where people are very religious tend to make life choices consistent with the norms and beliefs supported by the dominating religion, even if they are not very religious themselves. Importantly, after controlling for territorial characteristics, the role of neighborhood-specific religiosity weakened in the magnitude in Poland and lost its statistical power in Italy. This may indicate that the impact of religion on observed union formation behaviors is indirect: It does seem to influence observed family behaviors through the social pressure to get married and traditions, rather than through the force of Catholic dogmas.