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tion of individuals’ personal networks, such as living in partnership
(either married or not), living with or without children, leaving the
parental home, or experiencing one’s own children’s departure. This
structuring process will be systematically compared across three European
countries (Lithuania, Portugal, and Switzerland) with distinct historical,
social, and economic pathways. The youngest respondents were about 35
years old at the time of the interviews, while the oldest ones were about
- In order to directly connect the personal networks of the respondents
with their past life trajectories, we consider the 20 years preceding the
interviews for each respondent. Hence, the window of observation covers
age spans ranging from age 15 to 35 and from age 35 to 55, correspond-
ing to different life stages, observed respectively in the younger and the
older cohorts. While defining clear-cut age boundaries to adulthood is
controversial (Furstenberg 2000 ), we will consider adulthood as a social
category mediated by economic, political, and cultural constraints that
vary according to the age of individuals, making it both diverse and con-
tingent (Blatterer 2007 ). Moreover, we will consider how adulthood as a
process is shaped by mechanisms of structural differentiation such as gen-
der and education.
Life stages and transitions are characterized by specific role sets and the
changes thereof in family and non-family life spheres. In European coun-
tries, the processes of life course standardization and individualization
evolve differentially depending on the life sphere considered, as well as the
age and gender of the individual (Widmer and Ritschard 2009 ). From a
historical point of view, research results show (Billari and Liefbroer 2010 )
that the process of becoming an adult tends to get longer, to become more
variable and hence to be characterized by increased individualization and
pluralization. This pluralization associated with the rise in divorce and
remarriage along with the drop in fertility rates makes room for alterna-
tive forms of living together in adulthood in addition to two-parent and
two-generation families (Cherlin 2010 ). Brückner and Meyer ( 2005 ) sug-
gest that three processes are at play in this regard. The first is de-standard-
ization, which describes the fact that (sequences of ) events occur in
increasingly smaller parts of the population and/or at varying ages. The
second process is de-institutionalization, which is characterized by a
weaker link between social norms and the organization of one’s life course.
J.-A. Gauthier et al.