Risks, Resources and Inequalities: Increasing Resilience in European Families

Project Information

rEUsilience

Grant agreement ID: 101060410

DOI

10.3030/101060410

Project closed

EC signature date 8 June 2022

Start date 1 September 2022

End date 31 August 2025

Funded under

• Culture, creativity and inclusive society

Total cost

€ 2 317 925,50

EU contribution

€ 2 317 925,50

Coordinated by

STOCKHOLMS UNIVERSITET
Sweden

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - rEUsilience (Risks, Resources and Inequalities: Increasing Resilience in European Families)

Reporting period: 2023-12-01 to 2025-08-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

The problem that rEUsilience tackles is of lack of adaptive capacities or resilience (understood from a familial rather than individual perspective) and resulting dilemmas and inequalities. The context is one of fast-paced changes in labour markets and income security to which families have to act as key responsive entities, cushioning potentially negative impacts and enabling/disabling risk-taking and change. In focusing especially on families that may not be able to respond and understanding the conditions that make for familial resilience more generally, the project answers 2 research questions: What challenges and difficulties are created or exacerbated for families by labour markets in the ‘new world of work’ and how do families try to overcome these? How do social policies contribute to familial resilience especially in terms of the extent to which they are inclusive, flexible and complementary?

To answer these questions rEUsilience looked at what different families actually do in situations calling for adaptiveness and identified perceived trade-offs in the context of families’ relations, commitments and different resource levels (broadly conceived). The project places this in a societal and policy context through both pan-European analyses of existing data (on policy and practice) and new focus group research in 6 quite different welfare states (BE, ES, HR, PL, SE, UK). Taken as a whole, the project’s research identified the level of risk and socio-economic insecurity faced by families across Europe and the relative capacity of different family types to absorb socio-economic shocks by adjusting behaviours and structural arrangements.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

During the first period of the project, the focus was on taking stock of evidence. We list four major efforts here.
1.) Work was done to develop a Compendium of the Risks, Resources and Socio-economic Inequalities among Europe’s Families.
2.) Longitudinal data was analysed to study whether and how women respond to the deterioration of the working conditions of their male partner by increasing their labour supply
3.) Focus group research explored family strategies to cope with risks and challenges and the resources they need to avoid negative outcomes.
4.) Policy case reports (on income support policies, on care policies, and policies for work-life balance) focused on inclusiveness and flexibility of specific policies.

During the second period of the project, the focus shifted in developing policy recommendations in the Policy Lab, along with continued stocktaking of novel evidence.
5.) Policy lab meetings
6.) EUROMOD simulations were performed to assess the potential outcomes of selected policy recommendations.
7.) 15 policy recommendations were formulated and validated
8.) A roadmap for implementation of the 15 policy recommendations was developed
9.) COFACE as impact partner has continuously used its position in Brussels and influence in the EU social policy arena to generate impact for rEUsilience towards policy makers, social partners, advocacy groups.
10.) In each of the six rEUsilience countries, a national event was organised to disseminate research findings.

This and other work was reflected in 34 deliverables, and 23 project publications (over and above the project deliverables).

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

The rEUsilience project has:

1.) Articulated resilience as a complex concept for research and policymakers that can be used to improve understanding of contemporary social and economic life
- A scoping review was conducted of the literature(s) on social resilience and family resilience, arguing that moving forward, family resilience research could incorporate structural inequalities more explicitly, and social resilience could focus on families more often;
- Conceptualising resilience in terms of three broad functions for social policy. The first was to enable families to make transitions. The second was compensation for structural and experiential challenges. The third was to ensure that sufficient resources are available for family life and family well-being;
- An “inequalities in resilience” framework distinguished between the need for resilience—measured by exposure to labour market risks—and the capacity for resilience measured by the ability to avoid poverty.

2.) Empirically mapped and explored individuals’ and families’ capacities to respond to risks and remain resilient
- a typology was developed to improve the identification of family types in European social surveys, and this was published in a peer-reviewed academic journal;
- it was found that groups with greater need for resilience, particularly those with lower educational attainment and single-parent households, showed lower capacity for resilience;
- focus group interviews showed that many families have layers of difficulties that arise from, cut across and shape employment, care-giving, income, and housing. When difficulties were compounded, it was very hard for families to break out of hardship.
- The development of a questionnaire (module) was driven by the recognition that existing survey instruments inadequately capture the complexity of intra-household dynamics in the context of labour market risks and care responsibilities.


3.) Explained the contribution of policy to family resilience
- Policy reviews highlighted how policy can play a key role in attenuating these inequalities, but also perpetuate inequalities between insiders and outsiders;
- The importance of childcare was shown to support (in particular mothers’) life-long learning, and that childcare availability is often inadequate to support training in evenings and weekends – resulting in particularly the less-skilled to abstain from life-long learning;
- In focus group interviews, it was shown that some families have access to strong support from policies, wider family networks and civil society organisations to fall back on, but this is not guaranteed and many of the support systems appeared fragile;
- A synthesis of the policy research highlighted gaps in implementations of “workfare”, the childcare gap between parental leave and early childhood education and care (ECEC), and (lack of) protection for families affected by severe illness and disability;
- The need was demonstrated for tax-benefit systems to reflect and respond to family diversity if they are to act against poverty.