197Research Aim
Our main aim is to understand how the personal networks of adult indi-
viduals are shaped by their past co-residence trajectories, as a proxy of
individuals’ biographies, in the frame of different contexts, structural lev-
els, and conditions. This main research issue can be divided into two
specific research questions.
- As the adult life course is said to have become more individualized and
pluralized, our first goal is to map the diversity of co-residence trajec-
tories in the past 20 years and to compare the main types of trajecto-
ries across countries. Diversity in co-residence trajectories will be
logically associated, but not exclusively, with the age and the birth
cohort of individuals, as the former indicator reflects the position in
the life course of the respondents and the latter takes into account
their location in time. Indeed, as a reminder, the window of observa-
tion covers the age spans of age 15–35 (for individuals belonging to
the 1970–1975 birth cohort) and age 35–55 (for individuals belong-
ing to the 1950–1955 birth cohort). It will also depend on the timing
of leaving the parental home, the presence or absence of a stage of
living alone, the timing of becoming a parent, and the presence or
absence of union dissolution. Other exo- as well as endogenous factors
may additionally influence this sensitivity, such as fluctuations of the
economic and or political situation in the considered welfare states. - To understand the linkages between family trajectories and personal
networks, we will investigate the impact of biographical factors (co-
residence trajectories) on the composition of personal networks, con-
trolling for the macro context (country) and a set of structural factors
measured at the individual level (birth cohort, gender, and education).
For instance, trajectories including a transition to parenthood will cre-
ate major changes in young adults’ sociability associated with the gen-
dered master status (Levy and Widmer 2013 ), thus encouraging a
focus on kinship ties, mediated by a priority focus set either on domes-
tic or on occupational activities, whereas living for a long period in a
single-person arrangement (alone) may foster the salience of non-kin
relationships and full-time occupation.
Linking Family Trajectories and Personal Networks