Social Background and Adult Socio-Demographic Outcomes in a Cross-National Comparative Perspective: An Introduction

An individual choice paradigm, focusing on individual preferences and values, has long dominated our understanding of socio-demographic outcomes. Recently, a trend towards an unequal choice paradigm, stressing how inequality in opportunities structures socio-demographic outcomes, is observed. This chapter outlines these changes and argues for a comparative perspective to examine how childhood disadvantage impacts these socio-demographic outcomes. The expectation is that the consequences of childhood disadvantage for demographic outcomes in young adulthood and for socio-economic and well-being outcomes in middle and late adulthood depend on the opportunities that national contexts offer to abate the adverse impact of economic and social deprivation. Subsequently, all chapters of the book are briefly introduced and their contribution to understanding this key issue is discussed.