Abstract
In contemporary societies, individuals increasingly experience non-standard trajectories on union formation and fertility patterns. To investigate the implications of such complex life course trajectories, we take advantage of prospective data from the 1970 British Cohort Study (BCS70) to study the associations between family complexity experienced by individuals between age 16 and 46, and their mental wellbeing and general health at age 51. Employing sequence-based methods, we construct individual trajectories of partnership and fertility events, cluster individuals based on their dissimilarities, and explore whether different aspects of family complexity are associated with mental wellbeing in mid-life.health. Our study contributes to the literature in a number of ways. Firstly we combine fertility and partnership histories to identify the partnership context of each birth, thereby identifying those who have children outside of a union, and those who have births with more than one partner - multi-partner fertility (MPF). Secondly, unlike recent work in this area which tends to rely on retrospective data, we use prospective birth cohort data and a life course framework to examine the parental and childhood factors which select individuals into non-standard trajectories of partnership and fertility.
Link Microsft Teams
Organisation
Raya Muttarak