Multigenerational households in Italy : how ageing and economic crisis are affecting individual trajectories and family forms

In the last decade Italy, as other European country, has witnessed a process of transformation and pluralization of family forms. This work aim to understand how significant demographic changes and the economic crisis have affected generational interdependence, family structures and solidarity networks in Italy. This country is particularly interesting for being the oldest in Europe, with one of the most high youth unemployment rate. My work takes in consideration major changes in family living arrangements, focusing on the multi-generational household types, both from a structural and a relational perspective. The family realm is a pivotal mediating force between societal changes and individual lives. Recalling the concept of linked lives, we can state how individual life expectations, constrains and choices are largely constructed within the family field and consequently the transitions of one member affect trajectories of all close others. Nowadays these trajectories have to be framed in a structural context where consequences of society aging and social events arising from the Economic crises (unemployment, illnesses, poverty, increase etc.) are impacting on the way families form, develop, and dissolve. A particularly suitable theory that allows to account the interplay of structure and agency in human behavior is the one of Bourdieu. Avoiding a straight bourdesian positioning, I’m using some of his key concept to frame my methodological approach that I would like to present. I’m proposing a sequential mixed-method designs, where quantitative methods are used to understand the objective factors that contextualize the increase of multigenerational households and qualitative methods to understand the subjective processes involved in the management of this kind of living arrangement. In the first phase, descriptive statistics and logistic regression are used to understand the most important macro-structural factors that influence the context within family members interact. Then, in a second phase qualitative methods, mainly life courses interviews will be performed to investigate how those structural factors shape habitus and affect individual trajectories. Here intergenerational ambivalences are central: the negotiations done among family members to live together, the tensions which can may occur between expectations on roles and individual behavior, as well as possible challenges to reciprocity norms and family obligations. Passing from speculative methodological proposal to pragmatic operationalization, I can broadly state to take a longitudinal perspective to grasp change over time. I’m confronting two waves (collected respectively five years before and after 2008, considered roughly the beginning of the crisis) of a repeated cross-sectional survey: the Multipurpose survey on households. Results elaborated from descriptive analysis and logistic regression models will be presented. Another key aim of the quantitative phase is to define some homogeneous clusters, detecting the recurrent biographical events (job losses, insufficient income, separations, divorces, illnesses) and individual features (mainly gender and age), which rise the risk to drive individual trajectories toward multigenerational living arrangement. On this taxonomy will be defined the criteria to set up a reasoned sampling for the qualitative analysis.