Transition to adulthood in the UK in an intergenerational context
The overarching objective of this research is to provide information to enable a better understanding of the contemporary transition from adolescence into adulthood in the UK within an intergenerational family context and how this has changed for successive cohorts of children in the UK. To-date most analyses focus on transitions on one domain usually school to work transition - here I propose to extend the analysis to consider more than one domain, in order to understand the inter-relationship of the processes involved.
There are three specific aims that underlie this objective:
- First, using data from Understanding Society and the BHPS as well as auxiliary files which were built based on these data, to create a comprehensive datafile detailing the sequencing of various events across multiple domains of people's life that mark the transition from childhood to adulthood for different cohorts of children. The four domains that will be considered include: 1) "living with parents" 2) marital and cohabitation 3) education 4) employment. The resulting datafile will contain detailed histories of movements into and out of parental home, educational, employment choices and marital and cohabitation histories along with a wide range of variables capturing children's socio-economic background.
- Second, is to document and deposit the generated data to the UK Data Service and promote its use by the wider research community through the UK data archive.
- Third, to use the data generated from the project to address three substantive and policy relevant research questions:
- What does the contemporary transition to adulthood look like and what are the typical patterns of transition to adulthood?
- How do the transition-to-adulthood trajectories vary by socio-economic background?
- How does the impact of socio-economic background on the transition to adulthood vary across cohorts and by gender?
Duration: April 2022 to March 2023
Funded by Understanding Society Fellowship Programme .
Researchers

Dr Eleni Karagiannaki
CASE Assistant Professorial Research Fellow
CASE Assistant Professorial Research Fellow