One of the major achievements of the team has been the completion of a highly innovative data collection, titled “Parents and children in the Netherlands” or OKiN (Ouders en kinderen in Nederland). Two aspects make these data unique. Foremost, a major challenge in previous studies of family complexity has been the fact that publicly available data sources do not include a large enough sample of (adult) children who did not grow up with their two biological parents. In contrast, OKiN features an oversample of adults who grew up either with a single parent or with a biological and a stepparent in their household (final sample size of 6,485 adult children, 71.9% from non-intact households).
The OKiN includes self-reported information not only from the adult child but also, from their biological parents, and if applicable, stepparents. In other words, we collected information on family relationships both from the viewpoint of the adult child, as well as, from the viewpoint of the (step)parents. Such multiactor data have been collected previously but never with such a large oversample of children who did not grow up with their two biological parents. What also sets OKiN apart from other multiactor surveys is that the parent figures were approached for participation directly and not via the adult child. What this means is that in these data, we have less of a problem with “happy families” being more likely to participate in data collections in comparison to families with more strained parent-child relationships (for more information, see publication by Kalmijn (2021) in Sociological Methods & Research). The unique features of OKiN have been detailed in a data brief in the top tier journal in Sociology, European Sociological Review and the data are made available to the scientific community via the Dutch Data Archiving and Networked Services (DANS).
This project has had a very clear impact on both the scientific community, as well as, the general audience. In terms of scientific outreach, the researchers in the team have published in top-ranking journals in Sociology (e.g. American Sociological Review, Social Forces, European Sociological Review), Family Studies (e.g. Journal of Marriage and Family, Family Relations), and Gerontology (e.g. Journals of Gerontology Series B Psychological and Social Sciences) to mention just a few. As can be seen from these examples, the work of this ERC funded team was highly interdisciplinary and of interest for researchers in a wide range of fields. At present, the team members have published about 40 manuscripts in peer review journals. The flagship paper was published in the American Sociological Review in 2019, with the main resukts provided in the figure.
