Home-Leaving and its Structural Determinants in Western and Eastern Europe: An Exploratory Study

Abstract

Abstract This paper focuses on the occurrence of home-leaving and its key structural determinants across the enlarged EU. By building on the literature for Western Europe and by cluster analysis of the data for 24 member states, it seeks to explore different constellations of structural factors, manifested in the grouping of similar countries, and possibly resulting in diverse, regionally specific incidences of home-leaving by youths under 35 years of age. The exploratory analysis noted three clusters of countries: the north-western, characterised by the earliest home-leaving and best opportunity structures for independent housing; the south-western cluster, marked by the latest leaving of the parental home and only somewhat less favourable opportunities, but highest family support; the north-eastern cluster, characterised by late, yet not extremely late, home-leaving, combined with outstandingly unfavourable opportunities and strikingly low family support. These differences, partly confirmed as statistically significant, are further discussed and related to welfare regime typologies and their usefulness. Keywords: comparative housinghousing policywelfare stateleaving homewelfare regimesEastern Europe Acknowledgements The author is grateful to the UK Data Archive for permission to use data from the European Quality of Life Survey 2003 and acknowledges that the original data creators, depositors or copyright holders, the founders of the Data Collections and the UK Data Archive bear no responsibility for their further analysis or interpretation. The author is grateful to three anonymous referees for constructive comments, and to Metka Gnidovec and Mitja Hafner-Fink for methodological advice. The author acknowledges the support of the Agency for Research and Development of the Republic of Slovenia, which funded the research upon which this paper draws. Notes 1 European Quality of Life Survey, 2003. Principal Investigators were: European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions and Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung; Data Collector: Intomart GFK (Hilversum, Netherlands); Sponsor: CitationEuropean Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions; distributed by UK Data Archive, University of Essex, Colchester; February 2006. SN: 5260.