Social perceptions and their changes about life course and timing of key life events in Europe

Bence Ságvári,Vera Messing

doi:10.31577/cas.2021.04.593

Abstract

The Institute of Social Sciences of the CSPS of the Slovak Academy of Sciences in Košice is an interdisciplinary workplace of social sciences and humanities with a primary research focus on the area of Central Europe in the field of social psychology, sociology and history.

Highlights

Expectations and norms for the different stages of human life are changing and are impacted by broader social, demographic, and political processes, such as increasing life expectancy due to medical advances and increasing prosperity, the expansion of education, the extension of the age of childbearing, and changes in compulsory education legislation
We saw that perceptions about ages associated to the life cycle and major life events have shifted: in all respects people tend to associate a later age to these
While perceptions about the life cycle and timing of life are changing in Western Europe, the dynamics are more pronounced in Eastern Europe, mainly due to the ‘almost Western European norms’ of younger cohorts

Summary

Introduction

Expectations and norms for the different stages of human life are changing and are impacted by broader social, demographic, and political processes, such as increasing life expectancy due to medical advances and increasing prosperity, the expansion of education, the extension of the age of childbearing, and changes in compulsory education legislation. This approach emphasises the agency of the individual (Buchmann, 1989; Heckhausen-Buchmann, 2019; De Vroom, 2004) and argues that the increasing importance of individual choice has led to a kind of second demographic transition (see, e.g., Van de Kaa, 1987; Lesthaeghe, 1995, 2019) This is referred to by others as the era of second modernity (Beck, 1982), in which the perceived age boundaries of the life-cycle are expanded, leaving room to deviate from socially and economically determined norms (e.g., religion, family). We conclude by summarizing our findings and raising the policy relevance to our results

Methods and data

The countries included

Conclusions