MAG 2026-1. Authors: Maaike Hornstra (Erasmus School of Social and Behavioural Sciences, Erasmus University Rotterdam), Maximilian Reichert (Erasmus School of Social and Behavioural Sciences, Erasmus University Rotterdam)
Individuals today experience more family transitions throughout their life than previous generations. This implies that for many children, family life is not always stable but marked by change. Experiences such as divorce, repartnering, or shared care mean that children may move between family settings throughout childhood. But how do children fare growing up in trajectories of family complexity? And does it matter when changes occur, how long they last, or how they unfold over time? How these experiences emerge across childhood and affect children has seldom been studied at the Dutch population level. We ask: to what extent do timing, duration, and ordering of experiences of family complexity matter for educational tracking at age 15? The dynamic nature of family requires data and analyses that accounts for this dynamism. This study therefore relies on a combination of relational population-level data, sequence analysis, and machine learning to answer our research questions.
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