Abstract
Children whose parents experience adverse social, economic, or health-related living conditions are more likely to face similar types of disadvantage in their adult life. However, a limitation of many earlier studies is that they do not account for the multidimensionality of the concept of living conditions, and that the child generation’s life courses are targeted as static and independent from the societal context in which they are imbedded. The current investigation addressed these aspects by focusing on the complexity, duration, and timing of disadvantage with regard to how adverse circumstances in the family of origin are associated with trajectories of social, economic, and health-related living conditions across adulthood. We also examined the role of educational attainment for these associations. Analyses were based a Swedish cohort born in 1953 (n = 14,294). We first conducted sequence analysis, followed by hierarchical cluster analysis, to generate ‘outcome profiles’, i.e. trajectories of adult disadvantage. Second, several indicators of adverse circumstances in childhood were analysed by means of multinominal regression analysis, showing the odds of ending up in the different trajectories. The results indicated that individuals who grew up under adverse conditions were more likely to experience disadvantaged social, economic, and health-related trajectories. This was particularly the case for trajectories characterised by a high degree of complexity, i.e. coexisting disadvantages, and—among men only—by a longer duration of disadvantage. Educational attainment was identified as a powerful mediator, suggesting that efforts to increase equal educational opportunity may be a way of reducing the intergenerational transmission of disadvantage.
Highlights
While growing up, children incorporate the values and norms of their culture and develop awareness of their own position in society’s overall structure of class and status
The current investigation addressed these aspects by focusing on the complexity, duration, and timing of disadvantage with regard to how adverse circumstances in the family of origin are associated with trajectories of social, economic, and health-related living conditions across adulthood
This was the case for trajectories characterised by a high degree of complexity, i.e. coexisting disadvantages, and—among men only—by a longer duration of disadvantage
Summary
Children incorporate the values and norms of their culture and develop awareness of their own position in society’s overall structure of class and status. This emergent awareness will partly build on the worldview that parents—from their vantage point in the societal hierarchy—convey to the child, thereby communicating anticipated limits of opportunity. An additional point concerns the contextualisation of the child generation’s life courses: outcomes are often measured at a single point in time and such analyses are unlikely to capture the link between ‘biography and history’, i.e. the interplay between individual lives, structural contexts, and societal change (Elder et al 2003)
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