NEWS A new article published in The History of the Family combines data from different Swedpop databases to investigate how the age of leaving the parental home developed in Sweden, 1830-1959.
Data from The Demographic Data Base (DDB) and The Scanian Economic-Demographic Database (SEDD) were combined and harmonized in a recent article on the development of home leaving age in Sweden during a period of more than a century. The article is a collaboration between researchers at Lund University (Martin Dribe), University of Gothenburg (Christer Lundh), and Umeå University (Glenn Sandström and Samuel Sundvall).
The high-quality individual-level data from the databases allows general trends in home-leaving patterns to be examined and compared between two regions of different economic foundations in Sweden, Scania to the south and Västerbotten to the north. The result shows that the age at leaving the parental home was initially low but rose significantly in both regions during industrialization, indicating a shift in the models governing home leaving. From a pre-industrial model shaped by the life-cycle service system to an industrial model where age at marriage became the main determinant of home leaving.
About the publication:
Samuel Sundvall, Christer Lundh, Martin Dribe & Glenn Sandström (2023) Models of leaving home: patterns and trends in Sweden, 1830–1959, The History of the Family, DOI: 10.1080/1081602X.2023.2222111
