ChildLives - Family complexity and inequalities in children's lives in Europe: A child-centred life course approach

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

This project aims to provide a comprehensive understanding of the trends, inequalities, and consequences of family complexity (e.g., divorce, repartnering, stepfamilies) across children's lives in Europe. Family change not only impacts adults, but it also has major implications for the lives of children who live in these families. Surprisingly, relatively little research has investigated children's experiences of family change across Europe. We know little about children's experiences of family complexity across their lives, whether their experiences differ by socio-economic background and across countries, the reasons behind cross-national differences, the consequences of increasing family complexity for children's lives across Europe, and the potential consequences of family change for children of the future. This project fills these gaps by taking a novel, child-centred approach and following the lives of European children as they get older using a combination of advanced longitudinal methods, machine learning, and simulation on a large number of European datasets.The objectives are:1. To understand trends in family complexity across the life courses of children in Europe2. To identify inequalities in the trends in family complexity across children's life courses in Europe3. To understand the consequences of family complexity for multiple domains of children's lives4. To explore whether and how multiple domains of children's lives are interrelated5. To develop an approach to predict family complexity in the life courses of the children of the futureThrough its innovative approach, this project will fundamentally advance our understanding of family complexity and its consequences for the lives of European children. It has the potential to open up new horizons for the demographic study of inequalities across individuals' lives and for studying childhood inequalities more specifically.