Young Adult Life-Courses in Uncertain Times: a Multi-Domain and Dynamic Approach

Lonneke van den Berg , Netherlands Interdisciplinary Demographic Institute
Kirsten van Houdt, Stockholm University
Ruben van Gaalen, Statistics Netherlands/University of Amsterdam (Sociology)

Young adulthood is increasingly characterized by uncertainty and flexibility. Previous research traditionally studies a few events that mark the so called transition to adulthood separately from each other. However, to capture how much uncertainty young adults experience, it is relevant to study how uncertainty in different domains (education, work, family, housing) relate to each other, as uncertainty may spill over from one domain to another. Have these combinations of uncertainty in different domains changed over time? And do they depend on young adults’ socioeconomic background? We study these questions using register data of all young adults (aged 18 to 35) in the Netherlands over the period 2011 to 2021. The findings show that young adults from more affluent families have more economic stability. Family formation without having economic certainty is most common among young adults from lower socioeconomic background. These findings differ over the young adult life course. Whereas early in the young adult life course young adults from affluent families were mostly not settled down, this reverses later in the young adult life course. In the next step we will relate these domains to each other in a LCA or by estimating correlations. Moreover, we will examine the results over the young adult life-course.

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 Presented in Session 66. Transition to Adulthood, and Beyond