Following in His Father's Footsteps? Intergenerational Transmission of Work and Family Trajectories Among German Men

• In Event: Aging and the Life Course Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): 7: Intergenerational and Grandparent Roles

Abstract

Which men replicate their fathers’ lives? Drawing on a life course perspective, we examine the intergenerational transmission (inheritance) and disruption (deviation) of work and family trajectories among German men. Men in Germany born in the mid-20th century followed a standardized script—entry to employment followed by marriage and children. But economic and demographic changes, including declines in stable employment, declines and delays in marriage and parenthood, and the rise of more egalitarian gender roles suggest that sons may find it increasingly difficult (or unattractive) to replicate their fathers’ life course. But do we see a cumulation of advantage (Dannefer 2003) for sons of dads who lived the standardized trajectory model? We examine whether, and under which conditions, trajectories are reproduced across generations. We draw on dyadic data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP v39, 1984–2022). We apply multidomain sequence analysis between work and family trajectories for 519 dyads, consisting of fathers 1930 to 1949 and their sons when they were between the ages of 18 to 40 to assess domain-specific transmission of life course pathways across two generations of men in Germany.
We develop a typology of intergenerational transmission that identifies similarities and differences among life courses of fathers and sons. Second, we examine whether intergenerational persistence (Vidal et al. 2020) in the male life course still exists. Specifically, we test whether fathers and sons show greater similarity in their work and family trajectories than do fathers and unrelated men in the son’s birth cohort. Third, we examine the macrostructural and familial conditions under which sons are more likely to replicate their father’s work and family trajectories. Specifically, we assess the extent to which the factors of region (East vs. West Germany), birth cohort, educational attainment, migration background, and family structure influence intergenerational continuity or divergence.

Authors

• Jonathan Simon Gruhler, Goethe University, Frankfurt

• Heather Hofmeister, Goethe University, Frankfurt

• Tomas Cano, Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia