Families and inequality: Trends in the education gap in family behaviour across Europe

Prior research has shown that highly educated families are characterised by family behaviours by which they gain resources (late parenthood, mothers employment, time with children) while their lower educated peers more often engage in family behaviours by which they lose resources (cohabitation, union dissolution). This pattern is particularly well documented for the US. Over time, the divide in family behaviours between families with different education has moreover gradually grown in this country and, along with it, childrens life chances have become increasingly unequally distributed. This trend has been aptly termed diverging destinies (S. McLanahan). For Europe, on the other hand, the link between education and family behaviour is less clear: in some countries, highly educated persons more often enter cohabitations or have higher divorce rates. Moreover, there is a clear lack of research for European countries in particular from a comparative perspective on how the gap in family behaviour evolved over time and across European countries between families with different educational backgrounds. This project addresses this research gap by studying changes in the educational divide over time with respect to (a) living arrangements (marriage, cohabitation, single parenthood), (b) mothers and fathers employment and (c) parents time with children across European countries. The research questions of this project will be addressed by means of different quantitative methods and will be based on several existing data sources: the EU Labour Force Surveys, the Generations and Gender Surveys and Time Use Surveys. Depending on topic and data availability, I will either apply a small-n approach by which 4-7 European countries will be analysed in a common framework or a large-n approach by which more than 20 countries will be included and the macro level context will be integrated into multilevel models or macro level models. The project fits a broader research stream within sociology and demography, analysing the links between education, employment and the family. It is innovative in that it provides evidence for Europe, which is so far scarce, and performs an analysis across time and space and is hence able to consider different institutional and cultural settings. In addition, the project looks at various types of family-related behaviours that entail different resources and therefore influence families wellbeing and childrens life chances. This comprehensive design allows us to put in context prior findings that have been rather fragmented and centred on single country studies.

The impact of education on family life In Europe, little research has been done on the question of how the connection between the level of education and family life develops in the long term and what differences exist between countries in this regard. The FWF-funded project "Families and Inequality: trends in the education gap in family-related behaviour across European countries" addresses this research gap. Together with an international team, Caroline Berghammer from the Department of Sociology at the University of Vienna and the Vienna Institute of Demography at the Austrian Academy of Sciences is analysing the correlations, which vary from country to country. A well-known trend, documented by a number of previous studies, indicates that people with higher levels of education tend to engage in a type of family behaviour that is more conducive to increasing their resources - both in term of economic interests and social needs: they become parents later in life, but then place a higher value on spending time with their children. Mothers are still more likely to be in gainful employment. Those who are less educated, on the other hand, are more likely not to marry their partners, to get divorced or to separate. Especially in the US, the gap in family behaviour between the more and less educated has widened in recent decades. A general trend reflecting social developments in the area of gender roles in Europe concerns the educational background of single women: "In the 1970s we see a positive educational gradient among single parents. Raising a child on your own was a new type of family behaviour at that time, one which forced you to go against conventional norms and which required a lot of resources. It was a path taken more often than not by the more highly educated. Then, in the 1980s, the trend reversed. More people with lower education levels became single parents." Depending on the country, this trend is more or less pronounced. Another study that emerged in the course of the project explores the question as to whether parents feel that they are spending enough time with their children. "Across Europe, fathers are far more likely to say that they spend too little time with their children. But it's by no means rare to hear this also from the mothers," notes Berghammer. "In Austria, about one in four mothers say they spend too little time with their children. That is little in comparison with Southern and Eastern Europe, where labour markets are more rigid and offer fewer part-time jobs or opportunities to work from home." It is striking that the more highly educated set higher standards for themselves. More: https://scilog.fwf.ac.at/en/humanities-and-social-sciences/15894/the-impact-of-education-on-family-life