Härkönen Juho, Bernardi Fabrizio, Boertien Diederik
1Department of Sociology, Stockholm University, 106 91 Stockholm, Sweden.
2Department of Political and Social Sciences, European University Institute, Via dei Roccettini 9, 50014 San Domenico di Fiesole, Italy.
Eur J Popul. 2017 Mar 22;33(2):163-184. doi: 10.1007/s10680-017-9424-6. eCollection 2017 May.
Previous research has documented that children who do not live with both biological parents fare somewhat worse on a variety of outcomes than those who do. In this article, which is the introduction to the Special Issue on "Family dynamics and children's well-being and life chances in Europe," we refine this picture by identifying variation in this conclusion depending on the family transitions and subpopulations studied. We start by discussing the general evidence accumulated for parental separation and ask whether the same picture emerges from research on other family transitions and structures. Subsequently, we review studies that have aimed to deal with endogeneity and discuss whether issues of causality challenge the general picture of family transitions lowering child well-being. Finally, we discuss whether previous evidence finds effects of family transitions on child outcomes to differ between children from different socioeconomic and ethnic backgrounds, and across countries and time-periods studied. Each of the subsequent articles in this Special Issue contributes to these issues. Two articles provide evidence on how several less often studied family forms relate to child outcomes in the European context. Two other articles in this Special Issue contribute by resolving several key questions in research on variation in the consequences of parental separation by socioeconomic and immigrant background, two areas of research that have produced conflicting results so far.
以往的研究表明，与亲生父母双方都生活在一起的孩子相比，那些没有与亲生父母双方生活在一起的孩子在各种结果方面表现得略差。在本文中，作为“欧洲家庭动态与儿童福祉及生活机遇”特刊的引言，我们通过识别这一结论因所研究的家庭转变和亚群体的不同而产生的差异，来完善这一情况。我们首先讨论为父母离异所积累的一般证据，并询问在对其他家庭转变和结构的研究中是否也出现同样的情况。随后，我们回顾旨在处理内生性问题的研究，并讨论因果关系问题是否对家庭转变降低儿童福祉的总体情况构成挑战。最后，我们讨论以往的证据是否表明家庭转变对儿童结果的影响在来自不同社会经济和种族背景的儿童之间，以及在所研究的不同国家和时间段之间存在差异。本特刊随后的每一篇文章都对这些问题有所贡献。两篇文章提供了关于几种较少被研究的家庭形式在欧洲背景下如何与儿童结果相关的证据。本特刊的另外两篇文章通过解决关于父母离异后果因社会经济和移民背景而异的研究中的几个关键问题做出了贡献，这两个研究领域迄今为止产生了相互矛盾的结果。
