Research project Social policy, life courses and health in Europe's welfare states during a century

This project has three overarching purposes:

1. To construct so-called life course social policy indicators showing how welfare states for different birth cohorts have responded to social risks that arise in different vulnerable phases of individuals' lives, including family formation, unemployment, sickness absence, and old age. These indicators will be constructed using institutional time-series data for up to 28 countries from the Social Policy Indicator (SPIN) database.

2. To use these life course social policy indicators to analyse to what extent social policies have succeeded in reducing the health risks associated with these vulnerable phases across the life course of individuals. The success of social policies in this regard will be evaluated by analysing three health outcomes at old age: frailty, depression, and self-rated health. Individual life-courses will be constructed and analysed using panel data for up to 28 countries from the Survey of Health, Aging and Retirement in Europe (SHARE).

3. To analyse whether social policies provided over the life course are more important for individuals who have experienced adverse socioeconomic conditions during childhood. By combining social policy data with individual life-course data, the project will contribute valuable evidence on the extent to which the design of different social policies may alleviate or even reverse cumulative inequality processes.