Previous research has shown that childhood disability incurs higher costs. Welfare state cash support is crucial to guarantee adequate social participation for families of children with disabilities. To properly assess the adequacy of cash support, the needs-based costs of childhood disability must be accounted for. This article investigates the adequacy of a cash support system that is designed to increase with the severity of the child's care needs for four hypothetical children with different types of care needs. Therefore, we build on recently developed reference budgets for adequate social participation for families with disabled children in Belgium. The results show that Belgian cash support is generally insufficient to enable equal social participation for these families, particularly for children with less-visible disabilities. This forces families to make choices about which costs are met by the support measures and which costs are borne by themselves.

Peter McMahan and Eran Shor (MS) published an article in Sociological Science critiquing our study on cumulative status bias in NBA All-Star elections (Biegert, K & uuml;hhirt, and Van Lancker 2023). In this article, we affirm the presence of cumulative status bias in NBA Awards. Crucially, MS focus only on the accumulated component of cumulative status bias, ignoring the impact of immediately preceding status signals, which decouple quality and status. Furthermore, we identify theoretical and empirical issues with their model extensions of All-Star elections and their reapplication to All-NBA selections. (1) We deem MS'argument for legitimate deviations between status and quality deeply problematic. (2) We argue that their inclusion of additional variables is not theoretically plausible in several instances, nor does it improve the models, which still support our findings. (3) We argue that All-NBA selections are a different application, not a better one, with no direct implications for the role of cumulative status bias in NBA All-Star elections. (4) We highlight flaws in MS' models, such as irrelevant covariates, an indiscriminate approach to confounding and mediation, mismeasurement, and problematic post-treatment and post-outcome controls. (5) Our re-analysis confirms that, even in the All-NBA setting, previous status distinctions cumulatively bias outcomes.

European statistics and policies commonly rely on household typologies that classify households based on the number of adults and children living together. However, these typologies overlook family relationships and classify any non-standard arrangement into a broad residual category of ‘other’. This approach fails to capture increasing family diversity across Europe and introduces a persistent North-Western bias into data and policymaking. As a result, families that do not fit conventional models may be misclassified or entirely overlooked in poverty assessments and policy targeting. This is problematic since family structures vary substantially across European countries and became more diverse over time. This article introduces the Families in Households Typology (FHT), a classification system that uses relationship identifiers in EU-SILC microdata to reconstruct family structures within households. The FHT reduces the share of individuals placed in the residual ‘other’ category from over 20% to around 5%, particularly improving identification in Southern, Central, and Eastern European countries where multigenerational living arrangements are common. The results also show that nearly half of all single parents in Europe live with another adult and are not captured as single parents under conventional typologies. This has important implications for policy design: many single-parent households may be excluded from targeted support due to misclassification. Reclassifying households using the FHT also reshapes our understanding of living standards. The poverty risk of single parents is often overestimated when the Eurostat household typology is adopted. When single parents co-residing with kin or unrelated adults are correctly identified, their average poverty risk tends to be much lower. These findings highlight the importance of moving away from basic household counts towards relational classifications that more accurately reflect the diversity of family life across Europe, rather than using typologies that reflect the dominant family reality in Northern and Western Europe.

In contemporary European welfare states, little attention is being paid to the 'hidden welfare state' of social tax expenditures (STEs) for private pensions. This lack of attention is surprising since the growing use of private pensions, like that of statutory pensions, has important implications for the public budget. The reason is that private pensions tend to benefit from reliefs in income taxes and social security contributions, which leads to government revenue losses. That we have little understanding of the size and social distribution of these STEs for private pensions is partially due to limitations of existing data. The available data typically overlook preferential social security contributions and/or do not cover all three phases (i.e. contributions, returns on investments and pension withdrawals) of private pension saving. To highlight the importance of conducting new empirical research on STEs, we examine Belgian second pillar pensions for employees (i.e. voluntary occupational pensions for employees) using newly available administrative data. This case study clearly demonstrates that more accurate measurements of STEs for private pensions are needed, not only to reveal these 'hidden welfare states', but also to improve cross-country comparisons of private pension expenditures and to properly include private pension expenditures in discussions on the financial sustainability of pensions.

Algorithmic decision‐making (ADM) is increasingly used by public organizations to allocate social benefits. However, it remains unclear whether ADM leads to more harmonized decisions, especially in multi‐level governance contexts like Belgium. Therefore, we ask whether, and to what extent, ADM is linked to the harmonization of welfare decisions across local social agencies. More specifically, we analyze decisions related to additional financial support in terms of (a) the likelihood of granting monthly financial support compared to other types of support, and (b) the amount of monthly support granted. In doing so, we focus on REDI, a digital rule‐based algorithmic system designed to assess families’ financial needs in Belgium. We draw on an online survey with respondents from 344 public centers for social welfare (PCSW), 40 interviews with respondents from 20 PCSWs, and policy guidelines from 86 PCSWs. Our findings demonstrate that the adoption of REDI can be linked to harmonization, yet only regarding the form and height of support, with users being more inclined to grant support monthly and provide a higher amount. Nonetheless, variance in welfare decisions persists, indicating a half‐hearted harmonization. With both financial and normative considerations at the local level playing a significant role in how the ADM system is shaped and implemented, this study highlights the importance of examining the organizational and political context in which ADM systems are deployed to understand their influence on welfare decisions.

Prior studies show that children with disabilities are more likely to grow up in poverty compared to children without disabilities. Yet, income-based poverty indicators do not accurately represent the standard of living for disabled children as they fail to account for the additional out-of-pocket costs incurred by the child’s disability. This study is the first to measure the needs-based costs for families with disabled children in Flanders (Belgium) to better understand their standard of living. We develop reference budgets for four hypothetical families with a seven-year-old child with cerebral palsy, an intellectual disability, and/or autism spectrum disorder. We draw on guidelines and recommendations, existing scientific knowledge, interviews with 19 disability professionals and 15 parents of disabled children, and a follow-up questionnaire for parents. The reference budgets allow us to estimate the needs-based cost of childhood disability and establish a threshold that represents a minimum standard of living for families with disabled children that is not driven by constraints of affordability, availability or accessibility. The results show that the minimum costs for the children with disabilities are 1.7 to 2.5 times higher than those needed to raise a non-disabled child. The additional monthly costs range from €516 to €1,087. They are higher when children attend inclusive education and childcare without access to subsidised care services, and lower when specialised education and childcare are combined with subsidised care services. Moreover, the European income-based at-risk-of-poverty threshold underestimates what the families with a disabled child minimally need to spend to adequately participate in society.

Studying families with social surveys is not always as straightforward as it may seem. The reasons for the challenges are both conceptual and methodological, stemming from the specificity of the data collection process. We explored several international social surveys in Europe to identify how they measure family relationships. We found that standard classification of families rarely use the full information of family relations available in surveys. This obstructs the identification of family types in households (e.g. multigenerational households). The shortcomings in identification of family relations between household members have consequences for our better understanding of interdependencies, the burden and consequences of informal care, and people's abilities to cope with adverse circumstances. To address these issues, we propose a family-centred household typology - the Families in Households Typology (FHT) - which helps to uncover the complexity of European households.

Over the past decades, many European welfare states failed to reduce poverty. We examine two coinciding trends: the inability to lower poverty rates, and the growth of immigrant populations. Immigrants have become the main contributor to population growth in Europe and have higher poverty risks than natives. This contribution quantifies to what extent national poverty rates were driven by population change. We present a Kitagawa-Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition of national poverty rates in 17 western European countries between 2005 and 2019 using EU-SILC data. The effect of shifting EU and non-EU immigrant populations on poverty rates is heterogeneous: while poverty in some countries increased substantially due to compositional changes, for the majority the effect was small or negligible, including in countries with above-average growth of foreign-born populations. Overall, in two-thirds of country-years changes in the population composition were not the main driver of national poverty rates.

IntroductionIntergenerational support is an important determinant of mental health. Due to limited access to formal care, the role of the family as provider of support became more prominent during the COVID-19 pandemic. To date, it remains unclear how intergenerational support from adult children to older parents was affected during the pandemic and whether this had consequences for the mental health of the parent generation.MethodsUsing data from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) Corona Surveys, we explore whether changes in support going from non-coresident adult children to their parents are associated with parents’ increase in depressive feelings. Additionally, we test whether the pandemic context and public health measures affected this relationship.ResultsDuring the pandemic, families are found to provide more support. These changes in intergenerational support, however, were related to increased depressive feelings for the older parents. Furthermore, both the strictness of public health measures and the concurrent epidemiological situation affected this relationship.ConclusionWe conclude that the family is an essential source of late-life well-being, but stressful life events, such as public health crises, put pressure on these intergenerational relations with potential adverse mental health outcomes. Future policies should take into account the ambivalent nature of intergenerational relationships.

BACKGROUND:Young children are spending an increasing amount of time in non-parental childcare. Despite this trend, few studies have examined how the intensity of non-parental childcare associates with mental health in parents, particularly taking the institutional context concerning childcare into account.METHODS:Data from the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions EU-SILC (2013) were used to develop a multi-level linear regression model. The sample was restricted to parents in dual-earner couples and with at least one child below the age of three (N=6709). Mental health was assessed using the Mental Health Inventory-5.RESULTS:Highest levels of mental health were found in parents who use a moderate level of non-parental childcare, while full-time childcare was associated with lower levels of mental health. Working parents reported better mental health in countries where spending on formal childcare was higher, or where using formal childcare use was more widespread for this age group.CONCLUSIONS:While this study does not allow to establish a causal relationship between the researched indicators, it does indicate that mental-health problems are not randomly distributed among parents but tend to cluster more densely within parents who use higher intensities of childcare and in countries with less supportive childcare policies. Research that ignores social contexts might therefore be limited in terms of generalisation.

The concept of resilience is increasingly prominent in the policy discourse of the EU and its member states. It’s conceptualisation and monitoring, however, remain under-developed (Bartova et al., 2023; Nieuwenhuis et al., 2023) – in particular when applied to social issues related to inequalities and families. In this deliverable, we present an interactive visualisation of socio-economic risks, resources, and resilience among families in Europe, alongside descriptive evidence of social policies. Resilience is typically defined around two main concepts: (1) exposure to a risk, and an (2) outcome (Mohaupt, 2009). We defined resilience as absence of a negative (socio-economic) outcome despite exposure to a risk factor (Nieuwenhuis et al., 2023). A determining factor for the ability to cope with negative risk factors are people’s resources. We expect that people with resources are better equipped to absorb risks or adapt to a risk factor and thus avoid a negative outcome. However, people do not live in isolation but tend to form families and/or households. There is a considerable variation in family forms and households, which necessarily shapes the risks individuals and families are facing as well as the resources available to them. In other words, families differ in their exposure to risk and their ability to deal with this risk through their resources, which then lead to different outcomes. We argue that when the concept of resilience is applied to social issues, it should explicitly acknowledge that there are socio-economic inequalities between different families, including the extent to which families are exposed to risks, have the resources to respond to those risks, and how this results in varying socio-economic outcomes.For the deliverable documented here, we compiled individual level survey data from EU-SILC and transformed them into an interactive visualisation to demonstrate how risks, resources and socio-economic inequalities vary across European families and households. To contextualise the variation in risks, resources and outcomes, we also included a visualisation of a wide range of social policies. The visualisation itself is the deliverable D2.3 and is accessible through the rEUsilience website (http://www.reusilience.eu/compendium).

Basic income (BI) has lately re-emerged as a topic of debate, without having lost its explosiveness and contentiousness. Of particular interest in this debate is the labour supply effect of a BI, which holds significant implications for its societal desirability, economic sustainability and political feasibility. To shed light on this issue and facilitate more informed policy discussions, this article delves into six decades of research, encompassing negative income tax and BI experiments, lottery studies and unconditional cash transfers (UCTs). In an effort to advance existing knowledge, we not only review the labour supply outcomes of existing studies but also systematically examine their design features, implementation characteristics and analyses. Our examination reveals the presence of significant methodological shortcomings in much of the empirical research. Great caution is thus advised when making broader inferences about the impacts of a BI.

Although diverse European welfare states have institutionalized an extensive infrastructure of public welfare services to redistribute resources, governments have been confronted with barriers in realizing the social rights of certain groups of citizens. Decentralization and increasingly local welfare provision has been promoted as a strategy to substantially realize social rights. In that sense, the vital role of frontline social work has been stressed in local welfare systems, being considered as dynamic arrangements in which local policymakers and professional social work actors are involved in the substantial realization of social rights. These trends have been frequently studied from a social policy perspective, but the role of professional social work on the frontline level has received much less attention. In this study, we accordingly rely on neo-institutional theory to explore how frontline social workers employ their professional discretion during processes of local social policy implementation, related to the broader circumstances in which they operate. Our qualitative study aims to tease out whether their strategic actions might transform and/or change the rules of the local institutional game. The qualitative analysis is based on policy documents and qualitative interviews with key actors in two municipalities in Belgium. Our research findings reveal three central fields of tension: (1) Rescaling of responsibilities to the local welfare system and community level versus in-built spatial concentrations of social problems and inequalities, (2) Efficient local welfare system organization versus wicked social problems, and (3) Fast local welfare system logics versus slow realities.

Abstract This chapter reviews the current evidence on the Matthew effect and discusses its relevance for understanding the outcomes of present-day family policies. The chapter discusses how the Matthew effect is studied and interpreted in sociology and in the field of family policy, focusing on subtleties involved in studying the phenomenon and its root causes, how it is conceptualized, and its functions or dysfunctions. An empirical illustration is presented of how the Matthew effect in childcare services across European countries can be studied and understood. The results show that in the majority of countries, participation in childcare is biased against poor children. While childcare use has risen over time, inequality did not decline to the same extent. This means that the children who would benefit most from being integrated into high-quality childcare are those currently most likely to be excluded. This not only jeopardizes the potential of childcare provision to reduce inequalities in early life but might even fuel compounding inequalities over the life course. Potential pathways to redress childcare policies in order to foster socioeconomic equality in childcare participation are explored. The chapter ends with a call to arms for more advanced studies into the causes, mechanisms, and consequences of the Matthew effect in social and family policies, with a particular focus on life-course approaches.

Intergenerational support is an important determinant of mental health for all family members involved. Due to limited access to formal care, the role of the family as provider of support became more prominent during the COVID-19 pandemic. To date, it remains unclear how intergenerational support from adult children to older parents was affected during the pandemic and whether this had consequences for the mental health of the parent generation. Using data from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement (SHARE) Corona Surveys, we explore whether changes in support going from non-coresident adult children to their parents are associated with parents’ changes in depressive feelings. Additionally, we test whether the pandemic context and stringency of public health measures affected this relationship. Families responded to the increased needs of elderly parents by providing more informal support. These changes in intergenerational support, however, were related to increased depressive feelings for the older parents. Furthermore, both the strictness of public health measures and the concurrent epidemiological situation affected this relationship. We conclude that the family is an essential source of late-life well-being. But, stressful life events such as public health crises put pressure on these intergenerational relations with potential adverse mental health outcomes. Future policies should take into account the ambivalent nature of intergenerational relationships.

In this contribution, we examine whether and why there is a gap in the use of formal childcare services between immigrant and native families across 21 European countries. We focus on three sets of potential determinants: (1) social class, education and labour market position; (2) immigrant-specific factors such as norms in the region of origin, citizenship acquisition and length of stay in the country of residence; and (3) contextual factors such structural constraints impeding access to childcare and traditional norms on motherhood in the region of origin. Drawing on data from the 2010 ad hoc module of the EU Labour Force Survey, we find evidence for an immigrant-native gap in formal childcare use. Adjusted for social class position, education and maternal employment, immigrant families are less likely to use childcare compared to native families across European countries. However, there are important cross-country differences in the size of this gap. The study also provides evidence for immigrant-specific explanations: acquiring citizenship and staying longer in the country of residence increases the probability to use childcare, while the strength of traditional norms in the region of origin reduces the probability to use childcare. Finally, we find that structural barriers to childcare use negatively affect childcare use for both native and immigrant families. Removing barriers to childcare use in terms of availability and affordability will benefit everyone.

This article presents the BAsic income in BELgium (BABEL) dataset on public opinion on the introduction of a universal basic income (UBI) in Belgium, collected through an online panel among a sample of 3000 respondents in spring 2021. The BABEL survey implements an innovative vignette experiment in which both the policy design (i.e., the benefit level, the universality) and the potential policy outcomes (i.e., effect on poverty, unemployment) of a UBI are set to vary randomly. This full factorial experimental design is appropriate to analyze the complex of process of opinion formation about a UBI which entails multiple considerations. Accordingly, the data enables researchers to assess the net effect of the different design characteristics and hypothetical outcomes, as well as the trade-offs people are (not) willing to make to support basic income. Additionally, the survey includes items about benefit recipiency, COVID-19, demographic characteristics, general welfare attitudes, behavioral intentions, and political opinion. These data are thus appropriate for examining which design or outcome factors are relevant in shaping support for a UBI as well as extensive subgroup analysis.

We examine whether and how social policy can be effective in supporting family resilience. The concept of resilience is increasingly used in European policy making. We formulated the first version of the inequalities in (family) resilience framework, that differentiates between two distinct types of inequalities: inequalities in who experiences risks, and inequalities in how well people and families are resourced to respond to those risks. Based on that, we select and analyse a number of policies and examine their potential for supporting family resilience across European countries, with a special focus on Belgium, Croatia, Poland, Spain, Sweden, and (to the extent that data availability allows) the United Kingdom. This examination will be based on a critical literature review and descriptive visualisations of (quantitative) indicators of social policy. This is followed by two policy case-studies used to demonstrate and test the framework developed here. The final section concludes and formulates recommendations and considerations to further develop family resilience in a policy context.

In many European countries, one needs a permanent address to be entitled to social rights. To address this minimum prerequisite, mechanisms for administrative inclusion are in place for persons experiencing homelessness, such as the reference address in Belgium. This paper disentangles the non-take-up mechanisms behind this reference address by drawing on interviews with professionals. Our evidence suggests this is a minimum minimorum of social protection, albeit it can reflect and reinforce exclusion of the beneficiaries. This article contributes to the debate on the entitlement and non-take-up of rights, and the possibility of an administrative address that includes the most excluded.