We commenced this volume with the observation that an individual’s family background exerted a substantial—and defining—effect upon opportunities, expectations, and outcomes in their development across the life course. In this concluding chapter we reflect that these effects are transmitted intergenerationally and, as our colleagues show, they span developmental life stages, occur in specific institutions, and manifest differentially within specific populations. The global South is relatively sparsely represented in inequality research, and the contributions in this volume are focussed upon Australian research findings providing new additions to a field of research that is, with notable exceptions, focussed on Europe or North America. We use our findings to pose new questions and conclude by summarising emerging directions for Australian life course researchers.

Disadvantage Across Developmental Stage, Institutions and Populations

When viewed within developmental stages across the life course, disadvantage plays out in numerous ways. In childhood our colleagues show that slower rates of cognitive and academic growth emerge in response to disadvantages in developmental circumstances. They show that some disadvantages cluster differently for some children and differentially delay onward capabilities that then compound in effect over time. In adolescence, a time where increasing autonomy and independence is accompanied by critical decision points about education and vocation, parental engagement in children’s education—irrespective of family and school context factors—exerts a positive influence in tertiary study aspiration. Gratifyingly, where this parental engagement is diminished or missing, it can be provided by teachers, service providers or community members suggesting avenues for countering this aspect of disadvantage. By ages 18–25, typically characterised by rapid increases in decision-making and autonomy, our authors find that extended dependence and co-residential support have now extended the period of emerging adulthood. Young people from privileged backgrounds appear to have more opportunities to invest through emerging adulthood. Young people with high-income parents receive co-residential and financial support longer than young people with low-income parents. So, while autonomy might be delayed owing to co-residential status for more privileged emerging adults, the savings achieved by them may translate into greater life-advantages relative to disadvantaged young people with shorter periods of co-resident status.

Disadvantage and its transmission are also structured by the institutions of family and marriage, education, labour markets and in government decision making. Within the institution of marriage, results in this volume support the adage “two heads are better than one,” finding those who marry to be the least disadvantaged while those who remain single appear to be the most disadvantaged with cohabitors somewhere in between. From single status, our colleagues show that transitions to cohabitation and to marriage each result in advantages relative to one another in employment, financial wellbeing, and subjective wellbeing. The institution of education, designed in part to counter the effects of disadvantage and provide upward social mobility, displays a large SES gap in university enrolment and participation. Where disadvantaged students do complete tertiary education, it takes a relatively long time—at least 4–5 years after graduation—for the average low SES graduate to achieve outcomes in job-security, satisfaction and financial prosperity comparable to the average high SES graduate. Labour markets are particularly problematic in imparting disadvantage to some and not others. This is seen especially in the conflicts between workforce participation and parenthood. Women in disadvantaged households and those who have low skill levels, and thus low earning power, often experience the largest impacts offering a powerful mechanism for sustaining inequality in society, and most importantly, intergenerational transmission of inequality and disadvantage. Government institutions impart considerable instability into the lives of disadvantaged families and individuals. National strategies to promote the wellbeing of families are largely absent, children and family policies sit—at best—uneasily between State/Territory and Commonwealth jurisdictions. Dominant policy discourses most often fail to appreciate structural and community mechanisms that maintain disadvantage—or alternately offer solutions—in favour of presuming that most disadvantage can be addressed through individual behavioural change. Most of these “one size fits all” policies overlook contextual circumstances of specific groups in places.

Finally, our colleagues show that disadvantage differentially concentrates and responds in specific Australian populations. This is most vividly seen in respect of the Australian Indigenous population where disenfranchisement and historical injustices have produced, among other effects, persisting inequalities in autonomy, ownership, income, health, and education that have translated into shorter life-expectancies and intergenerational disadvantage. Our colleagues illustrate that attachment to Indigenous culture and cultural identity are individual assets that contribute to the health and wellbeing and buffer the negative effects of disadvantage in Indigenous children. Within the Australian lesbian, gay, and bisexual population structural stigma has decreased considerably but there is more to do. Large disparities in mental health, emotional wellbeing, self-harm and suicidal behaviours persist for LGB individuals. But our life course researchers show that as Australian society has become less heterosexist and homophobic, parents are less likely to reject their LGB children and as the life course progresses the emerging picture suggests resilience. Within Australian refugee populations, while challenges remain considerable, the picture of disadvantage is more hopeful: Children are outperforming their parents.

Emerging Directions

Our volume shows that social disadvantage is not equally experienced across all segments of Australia’s population. As noted in Chap. 2, this may require future research to continue to push forward the life course framework to better account for the trajectories for groups such as those that differ by national origin, gender, sexuality and place. Several chapters in this volume illustrate that marital status, family dynamics, and socioemotional wellbeing differ by subgroups suggesting that life course principles need to be extended to fully account for the diversity in outcomes we observe across social groups. Persistent differences across social groups indicate the limits of life course theory for fully understanding these patterns. While we know that social groups experience different fates, we know less about how social events have different meaning by groups.

One way to address this is through a stronger focus on intersectionality to help us better understand how disadvantage is stratified by social groups, such as race/ethnicity, gender and class. An intersectional lense posits that individuals occupy multiple social locations simultaneously, all of which may compound on one another to produce different types of privilege and discrimination (McCall, 2005). For instance, not all women experience the same outcomes; rather they will vary by their ethnic/racial and class backgrounds. Thus, if we pair a life course approach that acknowledges that where we end up has a lot to do with where we start, and where we start has a lot to do with the various social locations we occupy, this can give a richer and fuller understanding of individuals’ trajectories.

A second arena that we believe is important for future inquiry is to consider the role of place. Place has played a central role in Australian social policy as disadvantage or advantage is often concentrated in geographical areas or regions (Vinson & Rawsthorne, 2015). Place provides residents with different opportunities, amenities, potential access to networks, and social norms, which may shape important life outcomes. As Fincher (2021) has outlined, it may be useful to re-theorise place not just as bounded geographical sites defined by census tracts or postcodes, but as “locales” or communities shaped by the identities of the people who inhabit the space. Such an approach shifts the emphasis away from viewing place as a static, bounded geographical site to recognise the dynamic and fluid features of places, and their social features such as the histories, identities, intentions and interests of the people and communities that live in them. Given the centrality of place in shaping Australian social life, future work that focuses on understanding how place may act as a form of stratification in and of itself in producing locational advantage and disadvantage is important.

Australia now has a diversity of longitudinal data sources. This is seen in the broad usage of data examined in this volume from the Longitudinal Study of Australian Children, the Longitudinal Study of Indigenous Children, the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia Survey, the Building a New Life in Australia study, the Longitudinal Surveys of Australian Youth, and the Australian Census Longitudinal Dataset, as well as qualitative data. While many of the data sources provide insights across the Australian population, there are now sources of data that focus on small and difficult to recruit populations, notably Indigenous Australians, migrants, and refugees. Designed over the past 20 years, these are fundamentally new innovations in Australian data assets, and they reflect an emergent direction in the thinking of Governments, researchers, policy makers—and indeed—the Australian citizens that participate in these studies.

Further insights into life courses are enabled through provision of integrated and administrative data—this is becoming more prevalent and may open doors into findings more relevant to policy and decision making. Such data bring with them additional responsibilities for managing confidential data as well as meeting the demands of their quantitative complexity. Methodological advances are evident—both in the design of longitudinal data sources themselves which now encompass cohort, panel, time series, and integrated administrative data. Australia’s Multi-Agency Data Integration Project (MADIP) represents a considerable advance in national capacity to securely govern data integration and design safe access methods protecting privacy while allowing critically important planning and forecasting in health, welfare, and education and across governments. So too do individual state jurisdictions; notably, Western Australia and New South Wales have long standing data linkage capabilities that have pioneered the value and contribution that data integration can make in improving our understanding of how services are used, what they contribute, and in describing the health and wellbeing of Australian citizens.

Research in this volume also reflects the statistical and methodological competencies that increasingly complex data demand. Latent class analysis, growth curve and random effects models are now typically applied to examine associations and change. While these are used to reveal important effects, there is room for further innovation. For example, developments in relation to machine learning and predictive risk modelling that have potential to improve outcomes are further advanced in some disciplines and only slowly finding their way into social science to examine complex outcomes such as child abuse (see, Cuccaro-Alamin et al., 2017) and suicide and suicidal behaviour (Chen et al., 2020).

A substantial challenge to the many parties involved in life course studies is the planning and sustaining of these capacities. Longitudinal surveys and integrated administrative data provide an increasingly important source of information about Australians living their lives, over time and in place. The onward planning for sustaining some of these sources, refreshing others, and creating new sources poses both a challenge and opportunity to ensure that Australia has research and planning capabilities up to the task. Some worry that these data enable “surveillance of the poor” and reduce the complexity of disadvantaged life courses to numbers (Staines et al., 2020). While this is a legitimate concern, the research presented in this volume suggests that this propensity is both offset by the practical value of findings that describe and address intergenerational disadvantage as well as by methodologies of narrative and qualitative studies of lived lives.

In reviewing the conduct of longitudinal studies there is still the need for researchers to implement designs that capture change processes and particularly those with better measures of growth and change in physical, cognitive, emotional, and social capabilities; and that reveal more about the constrained choices, decisions and actions taken (and not taken) by the child (and carers) as they grow to adulthood. With respect to the transmission of disadvantage, a more deliberate focus on dynamic mechanisms of change, rather than the status of an outcome at one point in time, is needed. Disadvantage is characterized by the impaired acquisition, poor accumulation, transformation or loss of human capital and human capability across the life course. Implementing study designs that define and measure this acquisition, accumulation, transformation and loss of skill, knowledge and effort as individuals grow is essential in addressing underlying mechanisms of disadvantage.

Finally, it is important that our data sources do not circumscribe our understanding of the relational, systemic and institutional features of social disadvantage. Studies based on collecting information about individuals, as many social surveys do, encourage a focus on individual attributes and characteristics as the main drivers of disadvantage and shift attention away from institutions such as families, labour markets, schools and governments. But as many chapters in this volume show, inequalities are generated by the social positions that individuals occupy and the relationships between people, positions, and institutions, not by individuals acting alone (Tomascovic-Devey & Avent-Holt, 2019). Individuals have agency to shape these relationships but within bounded contexts and circumstances. It is important that we continue to foreground the social and relational nature of disadvantage and encourage policy solutions that go beyond changing individual behaviour to those that change the opportunity structures that define social relationships.

Final Thoughts

One clear omission is that our book focuses on Australian society before COVID-19, with the exception of Chap. 6. The events of the last 2 years have brought into clear view many of the themes and issues underlying the chapters in this volume. COVID-19 has shone a spotlight on the social, cultural and economic cleavages that underpin our societies and made visible often unrecognised and unacknowledged disparities across individuals, groups and places in access to resources, opportunities and services. It has also brought into sharp view the consequences of increased risks and uncertainties, and how age, place and the timing of events are so consequential for opportunities and outcomes going forward. For many Australians COVID-19 is their first experience of a truly global sudden disaster. While some older generations may have experienced the loss, disruption and devastating impacts of the Great Depression and two World Wars, for younger generations the experience of COVID-19 and the range of measures put in place to combat the pandemic is their first encounter with global social disaster that has both short and long-term impacts on their lives.

To understand the full impact of the pandemic we will need a long view of the implications and outcomes of events and some groups will certainly fare worse than others (Settersen et al., 2020). Young Australians may be particularly affected. The uncertainties and day-to-day routine changes brought about by school closures, employment disruptions and lockdowns are not only affecting their wellbeing now but will certainly shape their onward life course journeys. Australia has fared comparatively well, to date, in terms of hospitalisation and mortality rates compared to many other countries and some of the early government responses to the outbreak raised unexpected opportunities for positive redesign of policy (Baxter et al., 2021). But the economic upheaval, job loss, school stoppages, business closures, education disruptions, travel restrictions, border closures and psychological consequences of virus outbreaks and the consequent sustained lockdowns is likely to have wide-ranging and long-lasting consequences, many of which are still largely unknown.

We hope that our work here highlights the value of a life course approach for studying these consequences and for understanding variations in outcomes across life course stages, places and populations. We believe that the value of such work will be greatly enhanced if the research is multidisciplinary and genuinely collaborative across sectors and agencies. Research that speaks only to colleagues in the academy and those with like-minded orientations will be much less useful in our view than research that is oriented outward to current policy challenges and speaks to governments and agencies that are tasked with designing solutions. Genuine multidisciplinary and cross-sectoral partnerships and collaborations that address research design, data collection, analyses, and translation of evidence into solutions is essential if we are to be successful in reducing social disadvantage and responding to emerging challenges.