Демографическая модернизация и возраст вступления в первый брак у народов Северного Кавказа

Демографическое обозрение. 2021. Т. 8. № 2. С. 95–127.

Kazenin K., Soroko E. L.

The paper studies the dynamics of age at first marriage for indigenous peoples of the North Caucasus from the second half of the 20th through the early 21st century. We focus on interethnic differences in age at first marriage, attempting to assess them at different stages of the social modernization which took place in the North Caucasus from 1960 through the early 2000s and was mainly related to intensive urbanization. Using data from the 1994 Russian Microcensus, we compare the cumulative marriage rate at different ages for men and women of birth cohorts 1939-48, 1949-58 and 1959-68 of eleven peoples of the North Caucasus. It is noted that by the ages reached by two out of three of these cohorts at the time of the Microsensus, similar interethnic contrasts in timing of a first marriage are observed in different cohorts. The same 11 peoples are then compared in terms of the proportion of persons ever married in different age groups at the time of the 2010 Russian Population Census. It is demonstrated that the interethnic differences are nearly the same as for the studied cohorts. Furthermore, comparison of the singulate mean ages at marriage (SMAMs) at the time of the 1994 Microcensus and the 2010 census shows that for most peoples of the North Caucasus the age at marriage became higher, both for men and women, during that period. We conclude that, of the two processes commonly considered as elements of demographic modernization (increasing the age at which one gets married and decreasing inter-ethnic differences based on that age), only the first was actively pursued in the Northern Caucasus during the period under review. Possible explanations of the stability of interethnic differences are considered based on results of field studies.

Keywords: модернизация, брачность, modernization, Северный Кавказ, этничность, marriage, North Caucasus, ethnicity, cohort analysis, эффект когорты

Publication based on the results of: Demographic and migration potentials of Russia in the 21st century (2021)