Family policy research in Europe

Abstract

With a focus on European countries, this chapter describes the trajectory of 'the field' of family policy research roughly from the 1970s, maps its current state in the 2000s, and lays out emerging topics and those likely to occupy family policy research in the future. We take stock of these developments addressing four key questions: (1) Which family policy outcomes are studied? (2) Which policies are analyzed? What are the dominant (3) methods and (4) theoretical perspectives in family policy research in the respective periods? The family policy research field, initially characterized by typologizing and clustering, has now moved towards assessing outcomes of family policies in multi-country studies, with a tendency to look at different types of family policy separately. A return to more theoretically oriented reasoning in future research could benefit the field, allowing for a greater contextualization of findings.