Solo living in the process of transitioning to adulthood in Europe: The role of socioeconomic background

Abstract

BACKGROUNDIn recent decades, patterns of transition to adulthood have undergone substantial changes, including an increase in people living solo after leaving the parental home. However, the extent to which solo living after leaving the parental home is a transitory state, quickly followed by union formation, or a relatively long-term state in the pathways to adulthood, and how long-term solo living is socially stratified are all questions that remain unanswered. OBJECTIVETo fill this gap, this study focuses on home-leaving pathways that have unfolded over a 5-year period after leaving home. It explores the association between socioeconomic background (parental education) and the long-term, solo-living, home-leaving pathways of young men and women across 29 European countries. METHODSUsing European Social Survey Round 9 (2018) data, this study applies a competing trajectory analysis, which combines sequence analysis to identify home-leaving patterns with event history analysis, in order to analyse their association with parental education. RESULTSThe occurrence of solo-living pathways varies considerably across Europe: both shortterm and long-term solo-living pathways are the highest in Northern Europe. Long-term solo-living pathways are associated with being in education and with high levels of individual and parental education. The effect of parental education does not differ systematically across European countries and does not differ between genders. CONTRIBUTIONThis study contributes to the understanding of the social stratification of the transition to adulthood across European countries by differentiating between transitory and longerterm solo-living, home-leaving pathways.

Parental socioeconomic status and age at leaving home in Europe: Exploring regional differences

“…Negative or null coefficients in line with the proposed hypothesis are prevalent in most Western countries (the Netherlands, France, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and Ireland), but not in Northern Europe, where the average association is positive. This finding, although unexpected, is in line with previous research (Klimova Chaloupkova, 2023;Schwanitz et al, 2017), suggesting that even in countries where leaving home is easier and occurs earlier than in the rest of Europe, the offspring of high-SES parents tend to stay longer in the parental home.…”

“…Portugal, but also in Nordic countries, where it has been proven that an advantaged background delays to some extent women's exit from the parental home (Klimova Chaloupkova, 2023;Schwanitz et al, 2017); little is known about young adults' choices and opportunities in Eastern European countries. Future research could benefit from the use of longitudinal or register data on specific cohorts to study at a fine-grained level which economic and cultural factors may facilitate or hinder young people's exit from the parental home and thus explain a portion of within-country variation.…”

“…The main predictor is parental SES. Because the ESS provides information about the highest level of education attained by the respondent's mother and father, as well as about their employment status and occupation when the respondent was aged 14, the choice was made to exploit all variables and to construct an index, following previous studies (Billari et al, 2019; Brons et al, 2017) and in contrast to those drawing exclusively upon parental education (Klimova Chaloupkova, 2023; Schwanitz et al, 2017). The benefit of this approach is that it incorporates all available information about mothers' and fathers' status during childhood, hence before individuals leave home, and that results can be cross‐checked with parental education or occupation separately.…”

“…Given the well-established fact that women tend to leave the parental home and to engage in family formation before men, leading to considerable divergence in trajectories during the transition to adulthood (Lesnard et al, 2016;Schwanitz, 2017), the association between parental SES and home-leaving ages might be shaped by gender as well. Surprisingly, previous studies found little evidence of gender differences in the association between parental SES and home-leaving decisions, when one or more destinations are included (Angelini et al, 2022;Billari et al, 2019;Klimova Chaloupkova, 2023;Schwanitz et al, 2017). Analyses will be conducted separately by gender to account for the diversity between women's and men's life courses.…”

“…This hypothesis finds empirical support in Billari et al (2019) who showed that in Austria, France, and Bulgaria young adults with high‐SES parents (obtained combined information on parents' education and occupation) are more likely to intend leaving the parental home early to live independently rather than to form their own families, and they are more able than those with low‐SES parents to realise this intention. Indeed, across Europe, a high socioeconomic background increases the probability to live alone after having left home (Klimova Chaloupkova, 2023) and decreases the chance to follow traditional family trajectories (Mooyaart et al, 2022). In line with the socialisation hypothesis, Iacovou (2010) findings suggest that higher parental incomes decrease the likelihood to leave at younger ages to live with a partner.…”