Background: The concept of resilience in familial and social contexts has gained prominence in academic and policy discussions. However, the interplay between family life and social inequalities, and how these relate to each other in the resilience literature, has yet to be documented.

Objective: This scoping review addresses this gap by analysing 250 articles published between 1998 and 2023. We compare the concept of resilience as applied in family and social resilience studies through four constitutive elements: (1) the unit of analysis, (2) definitions, (3) types, and (4) the risks, outcomes, and explanatory factors that are examined empirically.

Results: While both perspectives study individuals’ resilience, the emphasis in family resilience is on families, whereas social resilience studies focus more on communities and societies. Both perspectives emphasize the centrality of risks in defining resilience, yet family resilience scholarship seeks solutions within the family, while social resilience highlights community dynamics. Additionally, family resilience studies explore topics related to family-specific risks and resources, while social resilience studies examine external risks and resources.

Conclusions: The family resilience scholarship follows the clinical tradition in the resilience literature, viewing families as a separate entity that is resourceful and agentic. Socioeconomic risks are recurrent themes in social resilience literature, but not in family resilience.

Contribution: Understanding resilience through the lens of family inequalities in socioeconomic contexts can bridge these two perspectives. Incorporating factors such as labour market dynamics, family transitions, and educational attainment into definitions of risks, outcomes, and explanatory factors of resilience can enhance this integration.

This chapter contextualizes the situations and experiences of families with low resources in Belgium, Croatia, Poland, Spain, Sweden and the United Kingdom by looking at the intersections of family, care and paid work. It presents descriptive evidence on the prevalence of various family types, considers aspects of their financial well-being, and explores how the policy context has changed and differs across countries. The evidence shows a clear link between family type and poverty rates, and demonstrates that a high work intensity is no guarantee against poverty. In relation to care responsibilities, the share of families with young children under the age of 3 is shown to have declined, being particularly low among lone parents. There are marked differences in policy development across the countries, but a weakening of employment protection legislation is observed across all six. Based on a review of social policy literature, it is argued that, although income protection, employment legislation and childcare policies can be effective in supporting individuals and families, these policies are associated with inequalities in terms of family diversity, gender, migration background and socioeconomic status. Social policy can play a key role in attenuating these inequalities, but can also perpetuate inequalities between precarious and core workers.

Studying families with social surveys is not always as straightforward as it may seem. The reasons for the challenges are both conceptual and methodological, stemming from the specificity of the data collection process. We explored several international social surveys in Europe to identify how they measure family relationships. We found that standard classification of families rarely use the full information of family relations available in surveys. This obstructs the identification of family types in households (e.g. multigenerational households). The shortcomings in identification of family relations between household members have consequences for our better understanding of interdependencies, the burden and consequences of informal care, and people’s abilities to cope with adverse circumstances. To address these issues, we propose a family-centred household typology – the Families in Households Typology (FHT) – which helps to uncover the complexity of European households. 

In recent years, the concept of resilience has become increasingly important for understanding how families and communities respond to social challenges. Academic literature often highlights ‘resilience’ as a way to explain why some families fare better than others under similarly challenging circumstances, with a focus on agency and adaptive processes. Rather than focusing on what families lack, resilience research highlights the ways families actively cope with and overcome adversities.  The concept of resilience is also increasingly visible in policy discussions at the European level, to address a variety of social issues, especially in response to crises such as COVID-19. The European Commission’s Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF), for example, was launched to promote inclusive growth, economic cohesion, and job availability (European Commission, 2024). Similarly, the High-Level Group on the Future of Social Protection (European Commission, 2023) underscored social resilience as a key factor in navigating long-term challenges and emergent crises.  As resilience becomes more prominent in both academic and policy contexts, it is crucial to investigate how the concept is understood and framed, particularly in relation to structural inequalities and policy implications. The policy-focused interpretation of resilience often overlooks micro-level inequalities following macro-level shocks and instead emphasizes broad societal resilience and the capacity to cope with crises like COVID-19, highlighting a gap in how resilience is incorporated into the policy sphere.   

The concept of resilience is increasingly prominent in the policy discourse of the EU and its member states. It’s conceptualisation and monitoring, however, remain under-developed (Bartova et al., 2023; Nieuwenhuis et al., 2023) – in particular when applied to social issues related to inequalities and families. In this deliverable, we present an interactive visualisation of socio-economic risks, resources, and resilience among families in Europe, alongside descriptive evidence of social policies. Resilience is typically defined around two main concepts: (1) exposure to a risk, and an (2) outcome (Mohaupt, 2009). We defined resilience as absence of a negative (socio-economic) outcome despite exposure to a risk factor (Nieuwenhuis et al., 2023). A determining factor for the ability to cope with negative risk factors are people’s resources. We expect that people with resources are better equipped to absorb risks or adapt to a risk factor and thus avoid a negative outcome. However, people do not live in isolation but tend to form families and/or households. There is a considerable variation in family forms and households, which necessarily shapes the risks individuals and families are facing as well as the resources available to them. In other words, families differ in their exposure to risk and their ability to deal with this risk through their resources, which then lead to different outcomes. We argue that when the concept of resilience is applied to social issues, it should explicitly acknowledge that there are socio-economic inequalities between different families, including the extent to which families are exposed to risks, have the resources to respond to those risks, and how this results in varying socio-economic outcomes. For the deliverable documented here, we compiled individual level survey data from EU-SILC and transformed them into an interactive visualisation to demonstrate how risks, resources and socio-economic inequalities vary across European families and households. To contextualise the variation in risks, resources and outcomes, we also included a visualisation of a wide range of social policies. The visualisation itself is the deliverable D2.3 and is accessible through the rEUsilience website (http://www.reusilience.eu/compendium).Show less  

In this deliverable, we critically analyse the tax-benefit systems of Belgium, Croatia, Poland, Spain, Sweden and the United Kingdom, for their capacity to function as an automatic stabiliser and protect the income and reduce the risk of poverty for a range of different household- and family types. It was found that in none of the countries in focus and in none of the scenarios were full-time workers found to be at-risk-of-poverty. However, single parents (for whom working full-time is often already a challenge), are very close to the poverty threshold when working at two-thirds of the average wage in most of the countries studied here. Differences between family- and household types tend to be larger than the differences between different countries: single-earner households are closer to the poverty thresholds, as are households with dependent children – this accumulates in single-parent households usually being close to the at-risk-of-poverty thresholds. Short-term unemployment is compensated for reasonably well, at least when one partner of a dual-earner couple becomes unemployed and if they are eligible for unemployment benefits. Long-term unemployment of both partners results in an income below poverty. Finally, the findings suggest that neither part-time employment, nor living with grandparents, are guaranteed ways in all countries to avoid poverty for (previously) unemployed single parents. These analyses highlighted two relevant findings. The first was that in some countries, income taxation was found to be related to part-time working single parents falling into poverty. The second was even though (the sharing of) pension income can reduce poverty in households of multigenerational households, we found that this poverty-reduction capacity is lowest in countries where multigenerational households are more common (Croatia and Poland), whereas it is more effective in countries where such households are least common (i.e. Sweden).

Background: The concept of resilience in familial and social contexts has gained prominence in academic and policy discussions. However, the interplay between family life and social inequalities, and how these relate to each other in the resilience literature, has yet to be documented. Objective: This scoping review addresses this gap by analysing 250 articles published between 1998 and 2023. We compare the concept of resilience as applied in family and social resilience studies through four constitutive elements: (I) unit of analysis, (II) definitions, (III) types, and the (IV) topics of risks, outcomes, and explanatory factors empirically examined. Results: While both perspectives study individuals’ resilience, the emphasis in family resilience is on families, whereas social resilience studies focus more on communities and societies. Both perspectives emphasize the centrality of risks in defining resilience, yet family resilience scholarship seeks solutions within the family, while social resilience highlights community dynamics. Additionally, family resilience studies explore topics related to family-specific risks and resources, while social resilience studies examine external risks and resources. Conclusions: The family resilience scholarship follows the clinical tradition of resilience literature, viewing families as a separate entity that is resourceful and agentic. Socioeconomic risks are recurrent themes in social resilience, but not in the family resilience literature. Contribution: Understanding resilience through the lens of family inequalities in socioeconomic contexts can bridge these two perspectives. Incorporating factors such as labour market dynamics, family transitions, and educational attainment into definitions of risks, outcomes, and explanatory factors of resilience can enhance this integration.

Earnings segregation at work is an understudied topic in social science, despite the workplace being an everyday nexus for social mixing, cohesion, contact, claims-making, and resource exchange. It is all the more urgent to study as workplaces, in the last decades, have undergone profound reorganizations that could impact the magnitude and evolution of earnings segregation. Analyzing linked employer-employee panel administrative databases, we estimate the evolving isolation of higher earners from other employees in 12 countries: Canada, Czechia, Denmark, France, Germany, Hungary, Japan, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, South Korea, and Sweden. We find in almost all countries a growing workplace isolation of top earners and dramatically declining exposure of top earners to bottom earners. We do a first exploration of the main factors accounting for this trend: deindustrialization, workplace downsizing restructuring (including layoffs, outsourcing, offshoring, and subcontracting) and digitalization contribute substantially to the increase in top earner segregation. These findings open up a future research agenda on the causes and consequences of top earner segregation. 

Effect heterogeneity is central to social science, but standardized approaches are lacking and it is unclear which quantities should be evaluated. I propose a three-stage evaluation process that uses prediction methods, going beyond a conventional examination of group mean and effect differences. Prediction allows for gauging subgroup-specific changes in explanatory power and comparing the level of uncertainty that each subgroup faces. While drawing on traditional subgroup analysis and intersectionality theory, the empirical focus is on universality vs. interactive models of social mobility using detailed Swedish register and census data. Although the conventional interpretation of interactive models shows some support for subgroup heterogeneity, predictive results indicate minimal improvements in fit. However, subgroup differences in idiosyncratic error, or the subgroup level of uncertainty in outcomes, suggest substantial heterogeneity. In sum, the interpretation of coefficients and graphical analysis of interactions can be contextualized by expanding the criteria for assessing subgroup heterogeneity. Ultimately, this leads to a better understanding of subgroup particularities, thus guiding future research toward richer answers. 

The rEUsilience project is concerned with labour market changes and how these changes affect the ability of families to balance income security and care. We consider families as agents who respond to these challenges to cushion potentially negative impacts. In the project, we try to understand what are the conditions that support family resilience. The specific questions for the rEUsilience project are: 

What challenges and difficulties are created or exacerbated for families by labour markets in the ‘new world of work’ and how do families try to overcome these? 

How do social policies contribute to familial resilience especially in terms of the extent to which they are inclusive, flexible and complementary? 

The concept of resilience is increasingly used in EU and national policy making. Yet, empirical foundation for monitoring social policies and their ability to strengthen family resilience is currently lacking. This deliverable builds a groundwork for development of tools for monitoring family resilience in the context of social policy. The first step we take is a construction of family profiles and analyse them on the distribution of risks, resources, and socio-economic outcomes.