University of Calgary

The Transition to Adulthood Project

Overview:

Some of the questions that this project is
addressing: How do patterns of time use change with young people's
transition to adulthood? What are the cross-national differences in the
timing and sequence of the transition to adulthood?

This project
is carried out as part of the IUSSP Scientific Panel on the Transition
to Adulthood in Developed Countries: Started in 2003, the Panel was
chaired by Anne H. Gauthier in collaboration with Dr. Francesco Billari
(Boccani University, Italy) and Dr. Elizabeth Fussell (Tulane
University, USA). As of September 2006, the Panel is now chaired by
Francesco Billari.

The official website of this Panel is: http://www.iussp.org/Activities/trans-index.php

Data resources:

We have compiled a list of national and international surveys that contain data on the transition to adulthood. Click here to download this document.

Short biographies of the Panel members:

  • Dr. Anne H. Gauthier (Chair)
    is the Canada Research Chair in Comparative Family Policy in the
    Department of Sociology at the University of Calgary. Her research
    interests include family policy, parenthood, cross-national research,
    and time use. Webpage: http://www.soci.ucalgary.ca
  • Dr. Francesco Billari
    is an Associate Professor of Demography at the Istituto di Metodi
    Quantitativi, Bocconi (Italy). At Bocconi, he directs the graduate
    degree program in Economic and Social Sciences (Laurea Specialistica
    DES). Dr. Bilari is also a Research Fellow at IGIER, and is currently
    Secretary-General and Treasurer of the European Association for
    Population Studies (EAPS) and Associate Editor of Demographic Research.
    Webpage: http://www.igier.uni-bocconi.it/whos.php?vedi=1252&tbn=albero&id_doc=177
  • Dr. Elizabeth Fussell
    received her Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1998.
    She then undertook a postdoctoral fellowship at the Population Studies
    Center at the University of Pennsylvania before joining the Tulane
    faculty in Fall 2001. Her research focuses on the dynamics of migration
    and industrialization in the Mexican border region, with a specific
    focus on gender and family. New research projects focus on the
    demography of the life-course in comparative perspective, including a
    study of the life-course of first generation immigrants in the US in
    the 20th century. She has published in Feminist Economics and
    contributed chapters to several edited volumes. She teaches Sociology
    of Family, Population and Society, and Immigration in the Americas.
    Webpage: http://www.tulane.edu/~sociol/fussell.html

Methodological resources:

Traditionally,
demographic events such as leaving the parental home, getting married,
and entering parenthood have been analyzed separately using survival
analysis and event-history analysis. More recently, methodological work
has been devoted to studying the sequence of events that constitutes
the transition to adulthood. Some key methodological references are
given below:

Aassve, A., Billari, F.C., Piccarreta, R. (2003). ‘Sequence analysis of BHPS life course data’, in CLADAG 2003. Book of Short Papers, CLUEB, Bologna, 2003: 3-6.

Billari, F.C. (2001). ‘The analysis of early life courses: complex descriptions of the transition to adulthood’, Journal of Population Research, 18, 2: 119-142.

Billari, F.C. (2001). ‘Sequence analysis in demographic research and applications’, Canadian Studies in Population, 28, 2: 439-458.

Billari,
F.C., Blockeel, H., Fürnkranz, J., Prskawetz (2001), A. “Detecting
Temporal Change in Event Sequences: An Application to Demographic
Data”, in L. de Raedt, A. Siedes (Eds.), Principles of Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery. 5th European Conference, PKDD 2001, Freiburg, Germany, September 3-5, 2001 Proceedings, Springer, Berlin, 2001: 29-41.

Billari,
F.C., Piccarreta, R. (2001). ‘Life courses as sequences: an experiment
in classification via monothetic divisive algorithms’, in S. Borra, R.
Rocchi, M. Vichi, M. Schader (Eds.), Advances in Classification and Data Analysis, Springer, Berlin, 351-358.

Billari,
F.C., Manfredi, P., Valentini, A. (2000). ‘Macro-Demographic Effects of
the Transition to Adulthood: Multistate Stable Population Theory and an
Application to Italy’, Mathematical Population Studies, 9, 1: 33-63.

Suggested reading:

There
is a vast literature on the transition to adulthood. We list below some
key texts to provide an overview of the field and most recent
developments.

Settersen, R.A. Jr, .F. F. Furstenberg, Jr., R. G. Rumbaut, & (Eds.) (forthcoming), On the Frontier of Adulthood: Theory, Research and Public Policy. (University of Chicago Press). http://www.pop.upenn.edu/transad/projects/frontier.htm

Shanahan, M.J. (2000). ‘Pathways to adulthood in changing societies: Variability and Mechanisms in Life Course Perspective’ Annual Review of Sociology, 667-692.

Furstenberg, F.F. Jr. (ed). (2002). "Early Adulthood in Cross-National Perspective". The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. Special issue. March.

Other reading:

Aassve, A., Billari, F., Mazzuco, S., Ongaro, F. (2002) ‘Leaving Home: A Comparative Analysis of ECHP Data’, Journal of European Social Policy, 12, 4: 259-276.

Aassve,
A., Baizan, P., Billari, F. (2003). ‘Cohabitation, marriage, first
birth. The interrelationship of family formation events in Spain’, European Journal of Population, 19, 2: 147-169.

Aassve, A., Chesher, A., Propper, C. (2002). 'Transitions from Home to Marriage among Young Americans', Journal of Applied Econometrics.

Aassve,
A., Billari, F., Ongaro, F. (2001). ‘The impact of income and
occupational status on leaving home: evidence from the Italian ECHP
sample’, Labour: Review of Economics and Industrial Relations, 15, 3: 501-529.

Baizan,
P., Billari, F., Michielin, F. (2002) ‘Political Economy and Life
Course Patterns: The Heterogeneity of Occupational, Family and
Household Trajectories of Spanish Young People’, Demographic Research, 6, 8: 189-240.

Baizan, P., Billari, F., Philipov, P. (2001). ‘Leaving home in Europe: the experience of cohorts born around 1960’, International Journal of Population Geography, 7, 5: 339-356.

Billari, F. ‘Becoming Adult in Europe: A Micro/Macro-Demographic Perspective’, Demographic Research, (accepted pending revisions).

Billari, F. (2001). ‘The analysis of early life courses: complex descriptions of the transition to adulthood’, Journal of Population Research, 18, 2: 119-142.

Fussell, E. (2002). ‘Youth in Aging Societies.’ In: J. Mortimer, & R. Larson. (Eds.), The Future of Adolescent Experience: Societal Trends and the Transition to Adulthood. NY, NY: (Cambridge University Press).

Furstenberg, F. F. (2000). ‘The sociology of adolescence and youth in the 1990s: A critical commentary ’, Journal of Marriage and the Family, 62:4: 896-910.

Gauthier, A.H., Furstenberg, F.F. Jr. (2002). ‘The transition to adulthood: a time use perspective’, The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. 580 (March): 153--171. (see also the erratum in the June issue of the Annals).

Settersten, R. A., Jr. (2003a). Age structuring and the rhythm of the life course. In J. Mortimer & M. Shanahan (Eds.), Handbook of the life course (pp. 81-98). New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers.

Settersten, R. A., Jr. (2003b). Rethinking social policy: Lessons of a life-course perspective. In R. A. Settersten, Jr. (Ed.), Invitation to the life course: Toward new understandings of later life (pp. 191-224). Amityville, NY: Baywood Publishing Company.

Links to other transition to adulthood projects: