Stratified Pathways to Italy's "Latest-Late" Transition to Adulthood

Luca Badolato , The Ohio State University

During the last decades, western societies have undergone substantial social and demographic changes, and the transition to adulthood progressively moved from an early, contracted, and simple pattern to a late, protracted, and complex pattern. These changes have been extensively analyzed under the Second Demographic Transition (SDT) framework, which finds the roots of the new demographic behaviors in the shift toward postmodern attitudes and norms. A growing, parallel literature on the transition to adulthood underlines the relevance of contextual opportunities and constraints and social stratification in shaping individual life trajectories. Using data from the European Social Survey 2018, we analyze the changes in the transition to adulthood and the link between socioeconomic background, life trajectories, and later life outcomes in Italy. From a demographic perspective, Italy is a unicum in the European panorama and represents the ‘latest-late’ pattern of transition to adulthood, linked to the ‘lowest-low’ fertility pattern that emerged among Southern European countries. Furthermore, Italy ranks at extreme positions among European countries in several socio-economic indicators, a proper context to analyze the stratification of the transition to adulthood in a European low opportunity setting. We follow a Sequence Analysis approach to compute a taxonomy of ideal type trajectories and analyze their evolution across cohorts by gender. Finally, we estimate the relationship between parental socioeconomic status, the pattern of transition to adulthood, and later-life outcomes, measured as life satisfaction, happiness, subjective health, and level of social interaction.

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 Presented in Session 22. Transition to Adulthood