Divorce is prevalent and often leads to adverse social outcomes among divorcees and their children. Digital platforms offering online post-divorce help may provide scalable, affordable, and accessible support for divorcees during this transition. The study examined the long-term effects (five years) of a post-divorce targeted digital mental health intervention on divorcee’s labor market attachment and income. Participants (n = 1,856) were divorcees from a nationally administered randomized controlled trial (RCT) tracked over a five-year period post their RCT participation using Danish national register data. Cumulative and by-year effects of treatment on labor market income, weeks on sick leave benefits, weeks on welfare benefits, and share of year unemployed were obtained using linear and count models. The study protocol was preregistered. Over the follow up period, participants in the treatment group spent fewer weeks on sick leave benefits and accumulated higher labor market income. By-year estimates for labor market income passed preregistered significance levels, but accumulated effects estimates and estimates for sick leave benefits did not. Digital health interventions may be a low-cost, high scalability way to address negative life consequences of divorce. However, more – and higher powered – research projects are needed to obtain better knowledge of their full potential.

Objectives: This study examines the association between divorce conflict and medicine prescriptions, primary care visits and hospitalisations, over a 10-year period around juridical divorce.

Design: A longitudinal observational study was conducted using a cohort of 1784 Danes who divorced between 2015 and 2017. Conflict was measured with the validated Divorce Conflict Scale, and health outcomes were obtained from national registers.

Methods: Negative binomial and logistic regression models examined the relationship between divorce conflict and health outcomes, controlling for prior health status, demographic factors and socioeconomic variables. Analyses included sensitivity tests to explore pre- and post-divorce health patterns, and an exploratory analysis of health trajectories based on conflict levels.

Results: A one-standard deviation increase in divorce conflict was associated with a significant 28% increase in medicine prescriptions, a 5% increase in primary care visits, and 13% higher odds of hospitalisation in the 5 years following juridical divorce. Sensitivity analyses showed that these associations were robust but also varied depending on the pre-divorce health period, highlighting the importance of pre-divorce health in explaining outcomes. Exploratory analyses indicated that high-conflict divorcees had consistently elevated health trajectories across all outcomes, with a significantly steeper increase in primary care visits before divorce compared to those with average or low conflict.

Conclusions: High-conflict divorcees experienced consistently worse health outcomes, including more medicine prescriptions, primary care visits and hospitalisations, both before and after divorce. These findings stress the importance of conceptualising divorce as a process and addressing conflict during the divorce process to mitigate long-term health consequences.

Recall questions provide the possibility of obtaining longitudinal information in cross-sectional surveys and are often used in family research. Yet, recall instruments may suffer from measurement issues. This study links a recent cross-sectional survey that includes recall histories of all unions involving cohabitation to administrative cohabitation records for Denmark and assesses the recall error in cohabitation status histories. Under mild assumptions, it distinguishes recall error from other survey error types, allowing for assessing the increase in recall error as time to the recalled period increases. The quality of recall for living with a partner decreases in a linear fashion by 0.5–0.6% points per year on average over a 20-year period. Results are robust to a series of sensitivity tests. The presented estimate of recall error for cohabitation status likely provides a lower bound for general recall error and shows by example how regression calibration methods can be used to correct for recall error even if only a small random subset of data includes true values. Recall instruments used in family research are prone to recall error, and failing to account for this may lead to biased estimates especially for longer recall periods.

Background: Digital health interventions are increasingly promoted as scalable and cost-effective approaches to support mental health and resilience. Short-term benefits are well documented, but evidence on long-term outcomes (beyond 12 mo) remains scarce, particularly when assessed with objective measures in large cohorts. Most studies to date have focused on small samples, relied on self-reported outcomes, and used follow-up periods of less than a year. This leaves uncertainty about whether early changes are sustained over time and whether they can be observed in objective indicators of health. This gap is particularly relevant for stressful life transitions, where the risk of long-term adverse health outcomes is high. Divorce, a common and stressful transition linked to poorer mental and physical health, thus provides an ideal case for investigating the long-term potential of digital health interventions.

Objective: This study examined the association between SES One, a digital health intervention for Danish divorcees, and mental health medication use, primary care usage, and hospitalizations over a 5-year follow-up period using Danish national health registers.

Methods: Participants (n=1856) from a randomized controlled trial of SES One in Denmark were followed for 5 years after divorce. Outcomes included mental health medication prescriptions (eg, antipsychotics, anxiolytics, hypnotics, sedatives, and antidepressants), primary care usage (eg, billable interactions with general practitioners, specialist practitioners, and psychologists), and hospitalizations. Odds ratios and incidence rate ratios were calculated to compare outcomes between SES One participants and the control group.

Results: Over 5 years, SES One participants did not have significantly lower odds of filling a prescription (odds ratio [OR] 0.836; P=.09) but filled 28% fewer prescriptions overall (incidence rate ratio 0.720; P=.045), indicating a reduce-not-remove effect. No overall differences were observed in primary care usage or hospitalizations. However, participants had 38% (OR 0.624, P=.003) and 27% (OR 0.730, P=.001) lower odds of visiting primary care in years 2 and 3, respectively, and 32% (OR 0.677, P=.046) lower odds of hospitalization in year 4, suggesting possible late-onset effects.

Conclusions: The findings advance the field by showing that a targeted digital health intervention can generate measurable long-term health benefits in a large cohort when evaluated with objective registry data. The results suggest that such interventions may reduce reliance on medication and health care services over time, not by eliminating needs entirely but by reducing them. These patterns can be interpreted as reflecting both legacy and late-onset pathways. Long-term evaluations with objective data are essential to fully capture the durability and timing of digital health intervention effects.

Livet i familierne har betydning for den retning, velfærdssamfundet bevæger sig i.

For børnene og de unge skabes muligheder, evner og karaktertræk i familien, og for mange voksne er den rammen om oplevelser, omsorg, tryghed og kærlighed.

Samtidig er det også sådan, at valget af samlivsformer i dag er mangfoldige. Mange bryder med det traditionelle, og viden om livet i de nye livsformer er derfor vigtig.

ROCKWOOL Fonden har gennem de seneste år opbygget en omfattende viden om familier og den betydning, de i samspillet med deres omgivelser udøver på individer og samfund.

Analyserne er imidlertid ikke tidligere blevet publiceret i en sammenhængende fremstilling.

For at øge den praktiske brug af fondens resultater udsendes derfor nu denne samlende formidling af forskningen i emnekredsen, herunder også analyser af familiemarginaliserede individer i form af børn og unge i mistrivsel eller anbragt udenfor hjemmet.

I bogen præsenteres endvidere en helt ny analyse af livet og trivslen i regnbuefamilierne.

Childhood poverty increases the likelihood of adult poverty. However, past research offers conflicting accounts of cross-national variation in the strength of—and mechanisms underpinning—the intergenerational persistence of poverty. Here the authors investigate differences in intergenerational poverty in the United States, Australia, Denmark, Germany and the United Kingdom using administrative- and survey-based panel datasets. Intergenerational poverty is decomposed into family background effects, mediation effects, tax and transfer insurance effects and a residual poverty penalty. The intergenerational persistence of poverty is 0.43 in the United States (95% confidence interval (CI) = 0.40–0.46; P < 0.001), compared with 0.16 in the United Kingdom (95% CI = 0.07–0.25; P < 0.001) and 0.08 in Denmark (95% CI = 0.08–0.08; P < 0.001). The US disadvantage is not channelled through family background, mediators, neighbourhood effects or racial or ethnic discrimination. Instead, the United States has comparatively weak tax and transfer insurance effects and a more severe residual poverty penalty. If the United States were to adopt the tax and transfer insurance effects of its peer countries, its intergenerational poverty persistence could decrease by more than one-third.

Indigenous children in settler-colonial societies have historically been exposed to frequent family separation; yet contemporary family separation through out-of-home-care (OOHC) remains understudied. We analyzed annual OOHC rates among indigenous and non-indigenous children (2010–2023) in four countries: Australia, United States, Denmark, and Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland). Data sources included national child welfare databases and population registers. We computed observed annual rates and generated age-standardized rates using parametric bootstrap approaches with Generalized Additive Models. We found that indigenous children experienced substantially higher OOHC rates across all countries. Annual rates ranged from around 1.5% (US) to around 6% (Australia, Greenland) among indigenous children, versus 0.6–0.9% among non-indigenous children. Risk ratios were highest in Australia (10.1–11.4) and lowest in the US (1.5–1.9). Our findings demonstrate that indigenous children remain disproportionately exposed to OOHC, with substantial cross-national variation in magnitude and age patterns that likely reflects different policy environments and child welfare practices.

The COVID-19 pandemic offers opportunities to study effects of in-utero and early life exposure to environmental changes. However, inferences from such studies may be flawed if the pandemic has changed the socioeconomic composition of parents. Analysing over 77.9 million live births from 15 countries, we estimate changes in the socioeconomic composition of the cohort born between December 2020 and December 2021 using interrupted time series analysis. We find that, compared with their counterfactual compositions, the December 2020-December 2021 birth cohort has a higher proportion of babies born to socioeconomically advantaged parents in Austria, England, Finland, the Netherlands, Scotland, Spain, Wales, and the United States while we observe the opposite change for Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, and Mexico. These changes in cohort composition may cause between-cohort differences in life course outcomes that are influenced by parental socioeconomic circumstances even if early life exposure to the pandemic had no direct effect on this birth cohort.

Increasingly children whose parents no longer live together are living in two households, alternating between family contexts. A growing literature documents strong, descriptive heterogeneities in children’s wellbeing across living arrangements. We combine longitudinal survey and administrative population data on 6000 Danish children born in 1995 to study how children’s emotional and behavioral problems change following parental union dissolution. Extending the existing, predominantly descriptive literature, we use several panel regression strategies that aim to control for unobservable confounding together with repeated measurement of the Strength and Difficulties Questionnaire to study children’s problems increase after parental union dissolution and examine heterogeneity across post-dissolution living arrangements. We find a substantial increase in emotional and behavioral problems following union dissolution, but only little evidence for substantial heterogeneity existing across post-dissolution family constellations and living arrangements. Our findings indicate that not only there is casual effect of parental union dissolution on children’s long-term wellbeing, but also that existing descriptive findings on differences across living arrangements likely are due to selection.