Funding: Ministry of Education and Research
Project period: 2020–2024
Researchers: Monica Five Aarset (project manager), Monika Grønli Rosten
This project explores couple formation across religious and ethnic boundaries. The project builds on themes central to the research on respectability norms, social control and parenthood in the previous program phase. The focus will be on youngsters and young adults from minority groups where arranged marriages are widespread and where marriage is considered a family matter. Research shows that concern for children’s future marriages can be a central driving force in exercising of control over children, but also that significant changes are taking place in connection with marriage and family life.
In this project, we will investigate opportunities for, and consequences of, entering into a romantic relationship or marriage that challenge endogamous norms (marrying within a specific social group) and understandings of who constitutes an acceptable partner. We will investigate couple formations across different types of boundaries. In addition to romantic relationships/marriages between persons from the majority and minority populations, it may include couples sharing religious background but with different ethnicities (or vice versa), couples across caste or clan divisions, or same-sex couples.
One aim is to explore processes of change over time, including how couple formation and the consequences of couple formation develop over life cycles and generations.
We ask:
- What changes are taking place, and how are the boundaries of acceptable and unacceptable partner choices altered?
- What happens when boundaries are challenged and transcended? Do the couples meet resistance, and if so, in what ways and from whom?
Data
Data material will consist of:
1) Qualitative interviews with young adults who have been or are dating, married or cohabiting with persons from a different religious and/or ethnic group.
2) Focus group interviews with young people in upper secondary school concerning their views on mixed couples, on couple formations norms and on understandings of who constitutes an acceptable partner