Project description
How job insecurity in parents shapes children’s futures
Social inequality is often passed down through generations, influenced by factors such as parental education and income. However, the role of precarious employment in this process has received less attention. In Europe, many workers are employed on temporary contracts, generating instability that can affect their health and income. This insecurity can also impact children’s development. Supported by the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions programme, the INSEQU project will explore how parents’ employment trajectories shape their children’s outcomes, particularly in health and education. The project will also examine whether the results differ depending on parents’ social class, gender, and migration background. By comparing Finland, the Netherlands and the United States, INSEQU aims to suggest strategies for reducing the intergenerational effects of employment uncertainty.
Objective
The intergenerational transmission of social inequality follows several pathways throughout one’s life. Scholars have investigated the role of parental education, social class, income, and employment status. However, less is known about the effects of precarious jobs, albeit it is a common experience in post-Fordist societies, to the extent that, on average, one in four workers held a temporary contract in Europe. Moreover, workers experience disruptive levels of work-schedule instability and work-hour volatility. Employment uncertainty has been linked to lower income, job prospects, and health of the worker and their partner. Emergent literature has linked parents’ non-standard jobs to children’s development and educational path.
In this project, I plan to analyze the link between parents’ employment trajectories and children’s outcomes, from perinatal to mental health and educational trajectory. I aim to make the following contributions. First, in the life-course framework, I integrate work and family trajectories of the adults acting in a parental role using multichannel sequence analysis. This approach allows us to focus on the timing, order and cumulative dimensions of disadvantage, both between the parents and over time. Second, I investigate the patterns at the intersection of social class, gender and migration background, using the Kitagawa-Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition. This method will help us disentangle the roles of composition and returns to life courses. Third, I explore how causally ordered multiple mediators —such as income, parental stress and health behaviour —can explain the observed patterns, by estimating path specific effects. Fourth, comparing different welfare regimes can provide insight on how to mitigate the effect of precarious work trajectories on the intergenerational transmission of inequality. In particular, I aim to compare the Finnish case with those of the Netherlands and the United States.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. This project's classification has been validated by the project's team.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. This project's classification has been validated by the project's team.
Keywords
Programme(s)
- HORIZON.1.2 - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) Main Programme
Funding Scheme
HORIZON-TMA-MSCA-PF-EF - HORIZON TMA MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships - European FellowshipsCoordinator
20014 Turku
Finland