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Project

Do Work-Family Reconciliation Policies 'Work' for Native Groups with a Migration Background? Costs, opportunities, Policy design & Experiences (COPE) in a Mixed Methods Approach.

Unprecedented increases in female employment and declining fertility levels have undoubtedly been the most important household transformations in post-war Europe. In response to these changes, European governments developed policies geared towards the reconciliation of (female) employment and family formation such as formal childcare and parental leave. Higher fertility and a relatively weak tension between work and family in countries like Belgium and Sweden suggest that these policies are effective. However, in the context of increasingly diverse European populations, particularly in forerunner countries, a new question has come to the fore: Do these policies 'work' for migrants' descendants? In the face of this new question, the COPE-project provides two major contributions. First, migrants' descendants' uptake and effects of work-family policies, depending on the design features of such policies in Belgium and Sweden are addressed using the richest register data available. Second, adopting a mixed methods research design for the Belgian case, the COPE-project benefits from the complementarity of quantitative and qualitative methods to study both differential patterns in uptake and effects by natives' origin, but also develop indepth understanding of how mechanisms of uptake and effects vary by origin. Our findings will be of utmost importance to policy-makers in the context of inclusive social policies, but also labour supply in the era of population ageing.
Date:1 Nov 2020 →  Today
Keywords:MIGRATION, HOUSEHOLDS
Disciplines:Household behaviour and family organisations, Fertility, Migration, Generations and intergenerational relations
Project type:Collaboration project