Research project Economic resources and social relations among children and youth

This project seeks to answer these questions using large-scale nationally representative data, predominantly collected by researchers in our group with questions designed for our purposes. Among other things, we measure economic resources multidimensionally on both the child level (e.g. cash margin, consumption, income from parents and work) and the parental level (incomes, economic problems and material deprivation), in order to see which type of deprivation matters for which outcome, and whether children’s own resources have independent effects.

The social context that children compare their situation to, and from which they can be excluded or withdraw, will in many cases consist of other children. Our data contains extensive contextual information, including sociometric data from school class peers, and compositional characteristics (based on register and survey data) for classes, schools and neighbourhoods, making it possible to define relative economic deprivation in relation to local and child-centered reference groups and ask how the relative economic distance to peers matters.

We study mediating processes in terms of psychosocial mechanisms such as stress, self-confidence and mental well-being (internalizing and externalizing problems), but also in terms of network effects. The longitudinal nature of our data means that we can use panel data methods as a way to improve causal effect estimation. We will also study whether some characteristics of families, children or social contexts make children more resilient or vulnerable to the negative social consequences of poverty.