Coming of Age in Europe Across Generations

It is claimed almost unanimously in international youth research that patterns of the status passage from youth to adulthood have become more de-standardized over time. The aim of this paper is to provide a nuanced look at the transitional patterns from youth to adulthood. The main question is: How do life courses change across different generations? For this purpose, changes in the timing,
ordering, (de)coupling and interquartile ranges of social, spatial and economic transition markers are described. We investigate, whether the patterns of these transitions into adulthood and their interrelations have changed across cohorts born up to 1935 until the mid-1960s for men and women. Using the SHARELIFE data collected in waves 3 (2009) and 7 (2017) as part of the SHARE study we are able to compare life courses of about 90,000 individuals aged 50+ all across Europe. For the analyses, we use event history analysis. The results of our paper indicate that social changes are different for the European country groups (Nordic countries, Baltic States, the Balkans, Western, Eastern and Southern Europe). There is no consistent pattern found for the whole of Europe. Therefore, the common practice to use the Western standard male biography as a comparative baseline—deviations from which would be labeled as ‘destandardization’—falls short. We find a large heterogeneity in transition patterns from youth to adulthood across European regions, which needs to be considered in further discussions of ‘de-standardization’ processes.