The data set comprises responses to a questionnaire survey with a wide range of items concerning finances, legal and relationship issues in non-traditional, cohabiting heterosexual couples. It is in the format of an SPSS .sav file with an N of 235 (having excluded a small number of respondents who did not meet the study criteria). The bulk of the data were obtained by means of an on-line survey with the remaining few obtained from a paper version of the questionnaire. Owing to the format imposed by the software used for the on-line version (PHPSurveyor) there are some instances where the precise response format for the items differed between the two versions. In order to merge the data into SPSS, some minor adjustments had to be made to make them compatible, such as combining 2 separate items in the on-line version on cohabitation length to obtain a single measure. To clarify, in the on-line version, two separate responses asked for the number of years of cohabitation and the number of months. These were combined in the final SPSS file into a single measure of overall cohabitation length in months. Thus, a respondent who had cohabited for 2 years and 6 months would receive a value in the final data set of 30 months’ cohabitation length. To indicate in full detail how some of the items have been combined for certain measures, an Excel file has been provided. At the top of the Excel file are the actual question items from the hard copy version of the questionnaire. Underneath in the purple band are the respective variable labels as they appear in the SPSS file. Below this, in blue, can be found the labels for the composite or recorded items that combine information from more than one of the original variables (for example, ‘household income combines information from the items asking for respondent’s own and partner’s income). The labels for the variable values can be found in the SPSS file in the conventional way. Studies of the monetary practices of (mainly) married couples have revealed gender-associated asymmetries in access to household resources. However, theory development has been restricted because gender issues are easily confounded with the ideological meaning(s) of ‘marriage’. In other words, is it being a ‘wife’ or ‘husband’ that produces such asymmetries, rather than gender per se? The proposed project aims to disentangle this conflation of ‘gender’ with ‘marriage’ by focusing on money management in non-traditional (ie unmarried cohabiting or non-cohabiting) heterosexual couples, The research will be in two phases: (1) in-depth qualitative interviews with individual partners in 15 non-traditional heterosexual (NTH) couples, including some that have specifically rejected the notion of marriage on ideological grounds, and (2) a larger scale survey of 300 NTH couples. Our main aims are to: (1) Provide a detailed analysis of how NTH couples organise their finances and compare this with existing data on married couples; (2) Develop theories of household financial management that are grounded in a more inclusive definition of ‘household’ or ‘family’; (3) Explore NTH couples’ understandings of their financial rights and responsibilities and consider the implications of their financial management practices for the proposed law reform governing financial provision on cohabitation breakdown. Our main aims are to: (1) Provide a detailed analysis of how NTH couples organise their finances and compare this with existing data on married couples; (2) Develop theories of household financial management that are grounded in a more inclusive definition of ‘household’ or ‘family’; (3) Explore NTH couples’ understandings of their financial rights and responsibilities and consider the implications of their financial management practices for the proposed law reform governing financial provision on cohabitation breakdown.

Data was collected mainly via on-line questionnaire with 267 individual respondents; majority (235) were cohabiting and the rest married.