Like brother, like sister: Sibling influence on their respective life courses.

Whether and how family of origin influences the steps someone takes later in life, is a fundamental question in the social sciences. Intergenerational influences have already been studied in life events like leaving the parental home, union formation, and union dissolution. But previous research has only focused on how children imitate the family formation of their parents (i.e. intergenerational inheritance). In this project, we shift the focus from intergenerational to intragenerational influences in families. The proposed project studies whether and how siblings influence each other's family life courses. We consider siblings as important social ties and draw from the life course perspective and social network theory to hypothesize how siblings influence each other's chances of leaving the parental home, forming a union, or dissolving their union. The project uses a sequential QUAN-qual mixed methods approach. For the QUAN-part, data from Belgian national registers are drawn from the Crossroads Bank for Social Security. This allows us to follow siblings through time and model their family dynamics with event history techniques. For the qual-part, data from indepth interviews will be obtained in order to gain further insights in the objective and subjective factors that influence sibling effects on these three life course transitions. The project contributes to the literature by investigating new directions through which family of origin influences family pathways.

Keywords:FAMILY RELATIONS

Disciplines:Sociology of family