Objective 1 aims to advance the understanding and conceptualisation of family diversity in contemporary societies.
We focus on the measurement of living arrangements, family forms, and, more broadly, family diversity in surveys and administrative data. The objective plays a central role in coordinating and advancing data collection projects, including the monitoring of the Berlin Survey and the design and implementation of factorial surveys.
Research Questions:
- How are living arrangements, family forms, and family diversity conceptualised and operationalised in survey and register data?
- How do measures of family diversity differ across data sources and disciplinary traditions, and to what extent can they be harmonised?
- How can innovative data collection approaches, such as factorial surveys, improve the measurement and understanding of family diversity, including perceptions of family relationships and obligations?
Family as a Prism
At the ECPD, we understand family as a prism for population diversity. Just as a prism reveals the spectrum of colors within light, studying population diversity through the lens of ‘family’ unveils a range of intersecting inequalities in health and wellbeing, economic status, and education that, understanding a prism also as a system, form highly predictable trajectories for health outcomes within and across generations.
What is Family Diversity?
It is the smallest unit in a society: the family. However, defining the boundaries of this unit can be a subjective task defined by one’s cultural or religious roots, sexual orientation, gender identity, life experience, medical history, and stage in life course. In addition, events like marriage, divorce, pregnancy, care-taking, death, and experiences of migration or collective trauma may further diversify the notion of ‘family’ in today’s crisis-troubled societies.
What does Family Diversity Mean for our Aging Societies?
For aging societies, this diversification could mean two things: either a shift in attitudes, norms, values, and behaviors within the family reduces or increases chances for multi-morbidity in old age. This is not only relevant for access to appropriate care infrastructures within and beyond the family unit, but also in terms of breaking trans-generational bounds of social, educational, and health inequalities that in different but connected ways influence pathways to healthy aging.
