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Diverse Pathways: Rethinking the Transition to Adulthood

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Families in an Era of Increasing Inequality

Part of the book series: National Symposium on Family Issues ((NSFI,volume 5))

Abstract

Social change has affected all young people—but not all in the same way. While the transition to adulthood has generally been extended, not all young people are delaying the step into paid employment , independent living, and family formation , especially those from less privileged family background. Existing templates for the transition to adulthood are, however, dominated by the assumption of a standard trajectory generally involving pathways through post-compulsory education, without taking into account the resources available to young people nor the complexities and variations of the demands they have to negotiate in making the transition to independent adulthood. Current transition research examining variability in transitions focuses on a dichotomy of experience, as for example, the polarization into slow versus fast transitions (Jones in The youth divide: Diverging paths to adulthood. Joseph Rowntree Foundation, York, 2002) and cumulative disadvantage which leads to increasingly diverging achievements (Kerckhoff in Diverging pathways: Social structure and career deflections. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1993; McLanahan in Demography 41(4):607–627, 2004). I argue that focusing on a dichotomy of experience fails to take into account variations in transition experiences, especially regarding intermediate groups who fall between the lines of this dualism. Moving toward a more flexible and dynamic understanding of transition experiences—a diverse pathways view—offers a more comprehensive conceptualization of variations in pathways leading to successful adaptations in the transition to adulthood.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The findings are based on the 1958 National Child Development Study, the 1970 British Birth Cohort Study, and the Longitudinal Study of Young People in England (LSYPE) born in 1989/1990. Own calculations.

  2. 2.

    Social status is operationalized by parental occupational status, as measured by the Registrar General Social Classification (RGSC). The RGSC is defined according to job status and the associated education, prestige (OPCS and Surveys 1980), or lifestyle (Marsh 1986). It is coded on a six-point scale: I—professional; II—managerial and technical; IIINM—skilled non-manual; IIIM—skilled manual; IV—partly skilled; and V—unskilled. For ease of interpretation, these have been grouped as professional/managerial (I and II), skilled (IIINM and IIIM), and partly/unskilled (IV and V). The measure is defined by fathers or mothers occupational status, whichever is higher (if there is no father in the household, the RGSC of the mother was used).

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Acknowledgments

Work on this manuscript was supported through funding from the UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC: ES/J019135/1) for the Centre for Learning and Life Chances in the Knowledge Economies and Societies (Llakes). The findings and conclusions in this report are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of the funders.

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Schoon, I. (2015). Diverse Pathways: Rethinking the Transition to Adulthood. In: Amato, P., Booth, A., McHale, S., Van Hook, J. (eds) Families in an Era of Increasing Inequality. National Symposium on Family Issues, vol 5. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-08308-7_9

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