All is not relative: intergenerational norms in Europe

ABSTRACT

Is the sense of obligation we feel towards our parents comparable to the one we feel towards our children? Most studies of normative solidarity measure only filial norms, that is, norms for children’s obligations towards parents, whilst largely ignoring parental norms, that is, norms for parents’ obligations towards children. This article quantitatively investigates parental and filial norms in 20 countries within 5 European regions. The article examines the question of whether the family cultures of North-West Europe can be understood as cultures of descending familialism, that is, cultures in which parental obligations are emphasised over filial obligations, as opposed to cultures of extreme individualism. The article contributes to the literature on family norms theoretically by showing that family cultures should be differentiated not merely by their strength but also by their direction, and methodologically by highlighting the importance of developing precise measures of both parental and filial norms. For the Nordic countries in particular, the analysis shows that the family culture is pluralistic, with the question of intergenerational responsibilities being one likely to provoke discussion in these societies for years to come.

KEYWORDS:

• Intergenerational obligations
• parental norms
• filial norms
• ascending familialism
• descending familialism
• normative solidarity

Acknowledgements

I thank Margaretha Järvinen, Peter Gundelach and Kristian B. Karlson as well as two anonymous referees for constructive comments and advice on earlier drafts of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Bella Marckmann is Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Copenhagen. Her research interests are in the areas of family sociology, intergenerational relations, everyday life, housing, social capital, survey research and mixed methods research. She is currently working on a project entitled ‘The Moral Economy of Families’ funded by the Danish Council for Independent Research (DFF).

ORCID

Bella Marckmann http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4212-850X

Notes

1 Another reason, as Eekelaar (2012) points out, is that many writers fallaciously assume that the withdrawal of institutional dominance over the individual equals egoism and a weakened sense of moral obligation. This discussion, however, is beyond the scope of this article.

2 Unfortunately, no comparative survey has yet been conducted with both good measures of intergenerational norms and data from all or most European countries. The Generations and Gender Programme (GGP) includes a number of items measuring intergenerational norms, but this survey has not been conducted in as many countries as the EVS, and several of the regions compared in the analysis are represented by one country only. Appendix 1 contains a detailed overview of data sets considered for the analysis.

3 The weights also compensate for disproportional sample sizes in regions of Germany and Belgium. I have not weighted by population size, that is, smaller countries contribute as much to the analysis as larger countries. As the countries in the analysis represent institutional and cultural entities, it would defeat the purpose of the analysis to weight by population, since this would mean that the larger countries would entirely drown out the smaller ones, thus obscuring the intra-regional differences and giving a too homogeneous picture of each region. This would obviously be especially problematic in regions comprising both large countries such as Germany with a population of more than 80 million and Luxembourg with one of less than 1 million.

4 The regions are not entirely distinct, as variation within each region makes for a certain overlap. Appendix 2 shows the distribution of normative positions within each country. The most striking case is the Netherlands, which has a normative profile that more closely resembles those of the Nordic region than those of Switzerland and Great Britain.

5 Opinions differ as to the type of regression appropriate for binary dependent variables. Appendix 4 shows the results obtained by linear regression for comparison. Linear regression has the advantage compared to logistic regression that the resulting regression coefficients are readily interpretable, being probability differences (Rothman 1986; Hellevik 2009).

6 For detailed discussion of the correlation between religious belief and family norms, see Inglehart 1990; Halman and Riis 2003; Gans et al. 2009; Sabatier et al. 2011; Aassve et al. 2013.

7 Appendix 3 shows details of the categories of the education variable.

8 Regression parameters are included only in the calculation of predicted probabilities for those positions where they are significant.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by The Danish Council for Independent Research (DFF) [grant number 1329-00112A].