Research project SS/D5/03 (Research action SS)
No institution in Belgium has yet carried out any prospective research into families and their composition. The importance of this is, however, clear for a variety of reasons:
- from the demographic point of view, the different composition of couples and the duration of their lives have an influence on the mortality figure
and migration flows;
- from the social point of view, an increasing number of people, from children to the very elderly, will be confronted with poverty and isolation. Some of them will require material and/or emotional assistance;
- from the economic point of view, the increasing uncertainty of a couple's relationship surviving will encourage the partners to ensure the greatest possible degree of economic independence.
What's more, many sectors of economic life (housing, transport, social service provision) can depend heavily on developments in the family.
Developments are clearest at generational level, and so the project will adopt a longitudinal approach. However, this in no way precludes the possibility of making a transversal examination of the system at regular intervals with the aim of presenting to policy-makers the manner in which the phenomenon has developed over time.
The privileged instrument for studying the development of family structures and the structure of the Belgian population in terms of family is the dynamic model. Within this, behaviours are proposed at the most relevant level of statistical aggregation in terms of the possibility of moving from one status (e.g. unmarried) to another, taking account of the number of obstacles and opportunities. These obstacles and opportunities are distilled from the statistical material available in Belgium or in comparable European countries.
