International: Early Intergenerational Cohesiveness and Later Proximity to Parents: Cross-National Contexts of Intergenerational Solidarity

University Of California-Irvine, Irvine CA

Investigators

Abstract

This project will support a U.S. graduate student to conduct research at the Universiteit Utrecht in the Netherlands. Building on prior research with the U.S. National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY), the student will work using the Netherlands Kinship Panel Study to investigate residential choice, intergenerational solidarity, and the transition to adulthood. Intergenerational exchanges between adult children and their parents are a critical resource for young and old, and residential proximity is the best predictor of these exchanges. No research to date has addressed the extent to which children who are emotionally closer to parents choose to live nearby. This project has two objectives: to test longitudinal models which evaluate the relationship between earlier parent-child cohesion and later residential proximity of young adults and their parents; and to compare intergenerational family dynamics for two societal contexts, the U.S. and the Netherlands, which differ along a number of salient dimensions. This proposed research will contribute to determining whether early parent-child emotional closeness is related to later spatial proximity to parents. Coupled with analysis from the United States, the work using the Netherlands data set will provide the most persuasive evidence to date of the relationship between affectual and structural parent-child solidarity. The two country comparison will speak to the universality or context dependency of the solidarity-proximity relation between children and parents. The visit will also foster linkages between researchers working with the Dutch and U.S. datasets, and enable a U.S. student to build a long-term network with European collaborators.