出版社：Suntory Toyota International Centres for Economics and Related Disciplines
摘要：This paper focuses on pathways to adult disadvantage (or social exclusion) up to age 33 for a cohort of children born in Great Britain in March 1958. A sequence of interrelated analyses that build up a life-course account of the pathways involved in the origins of adult social exclusion are explored. The first set of results concern the associations of childhood disadvantage to subsequent adult disadvantage and pay particular attention to whether the pathways involved or the responsiveness to childhood circumstances differ by gender. We also provide a consistent account of the pervasive childhood factors, that are associated with a wide range of adult disadvantage for both men and women, and the specific antecedents, that show fewer but related links across similar domains of life-course experience. A sub-theme is an exploration of the sensitivity of the results to selection through missing information on the same adult outcome at the other adult age. We find fairly compelling evidence that the effects of childhood disadvantage are more powerful for women than for men: pathways to social exclusion are gendered. The second cluster of results concerns the influence of experiences of disadvantage between ages 16 and 23 for outcomes at ages 23 and 33. These intermediate experiences are shown to mediate the legacies of childhood disadvantage considerably, although considerable additional legacies from pervasive and specific childhood disadvantages remain. Experiences from ages 16 to 23 do not relate more closely to outcomes at age 23 than at age 33, though this would perhaps be expected, given proximity. The association is found to be more lasting. The pathways to adult social exclusion through these intermediate experiences are also gendered and much of the excess legacy of childhood disadvantage for women appears to be mediated through lone motherhood.Our third focus is on the continuities of disadvantage between ages 23 and 33. In particular, we show that the childhood and intermediate antecedents of outcomes at age 33 are rarely different for those who were or were not disadvantaged at age 23 on the same outcome. We also show the interconnectedness with the legacies of other disadvantages at age 23, which illustrates the need for a dynamic life-course approach to social exclusion and the fact that cross-sectional, isolated measures fail to capture the varying manifestations of earlier disadvantage that constitute the nature of social exclusion. There are clear associations of disadvantage at age 33 with experience of unemployment or divorce between ages 23 and 33, and the legacies of divorce are shown to be more powerful for women than for men. The implications of these findings for our understanding of the processes involved in the emergence of social exclusion are discussed and the need for policy responses, that differentially protect those who have recently exited an adverse state according to their lifetime patterns of disadvantage and take account of the interconnectedness of disadvantage as incorporated in the concept of social exclusion, is outlined.
