A subregional space-time exploration of family change: Italian municipalities, 1991-2011

This paper posits that the municipality level offers important insights into the study of temporal and spatial patterns of family change. We focus on the diffusion of one-parent families in Italy: variation in the structure of co-resident domestic groups is a crucial indicator of changing diversity in family patterns. We apply a hierarchical Bayesian spatio-temporal model to the data of the last three Italian Population Censuses, at the municipality level. Our results show substantial sub-regional and sub-provincial heterogeneities in the spatial organization of family systems. These patterns might have gone undetected if larger territorial units of analysis had been considered.