The European landscape of contemporary stepfamily life: a comparative study on the cultural and structural context of stepfamily formation, processes and outcomes.

The recurrent finding that children in stepfamilies do not perform better than children in single-parent families on most wellbeing indicators raises questions about why children do not benefit from the additional parental figure in stepfamilies. While often explanations are sought in the lack of a normative framework for these relationships, cross-national studies on stepfamily dynamics are scarce. Typically, studies make conclusions on the validity of this incomplete institutionalization hypothesis by comparing stepfamily outcomes with two-biological parent families. I argue that a reliable conclusion on contextual effects requires a comparative approach in which the country-specific context of stepfamily life is modelled as an exogenous variable. The working hypothesis is that the benefits of stepfamily formation will vary according the cultural and structural context of stepfamily life. The first aim is to describe the cross-national heterogeneity in the socio-economic gradient of stepfamily formation, the sharing of resources, labour division and economic and social capital within stepfamilies. The second aim is to explain the reported cross-country variability in terms of the context of repartnering of single parents, the restraints on sharing resources within stepfamilies and the social approval and stigma of steprelationships. The final goal is a state of the art on the European landscape of contemporary stepfamily life.