The influence of schools on the off-time transitions to parenthood and partnership

ended

Becoming a parent and moving in to live with a partner are major life events determining individual’s life chances and outcomes. Transitioning to parenthood and partnership at very young age (also called off-time transitions), have been linked to adverse outcomes along the life course. A potentially key influence on off-time transition to parenthood and partnership are secondary schools and classmates, as adolescents spend a large part of their time in school, surrounded by their peers. Project SchoolandTransitions will be the first to investigate the role of secondary schools and classmates in off-time transitions to parenthood and partnership. This project aims to gain a complex understanding of the influence of schools and classmates and its interaction with individuals’ characteristics and family backgrounds. To achieve this, I set three objectives: (1) decompose the effect of the school as a social context and the effect of peer influence of classmates; (2) examine if and how can classmates and school contexts mitigate or exacerbate the influence of family background; and (3) assess how the effect of classmates and school contexts changes over the years since leaving the secondary school.