Matthijs Kalmijn

• Ph.D., UCLA, 1991
• Netherlands Interdisciplinary Demographic Institute

People who migrate at a later age are vulnerable to loneliness: They are challenged to maintain social ties in the origin country while establishing new ties in the destination. In the present study, we investigate (a) the differences in loneliness levels between retirement migrants and older adults who reside in their country of origin (nonmigrant...

Objective: This paper examines variations in how international retirement migrants maintain intergenerational relationships with adult children residing in the country of origin. Background: Despite a greater need for support from family members in the later life course, many retirement migrants move away from their adult children. Prior studies ha...

Many studies have documented lower response rates of first- and second-generation immigrants in surveys. Several theories have been suggested to explain these differences, focusing on socioeconomic differences, differences in residence, and problems with cultural and social integration. Such explanations have been challenging to test, given the lac...

Union dissolution has severe consequences for women’s economic well-being. Theoretical work links these consequences to ethnic inequality. Ethnic groups vary in terms of separation rates, female employment, repartnering trajectories, kin support, and reliance on welfare benefits. The current study examines whether ethnicity moderates the dissolutio...

Previous work has found that adult children of international migrants in Western Europe have lower internal migration rates than individuals of native origin. This gap is important for differences in well-being, educational opportunities, and labor market outcomes. So far, however, little is known about the reasons for the greater geographical stab...

Objective This article aims to compare adult sibling ties of stepsiblings to the ties of full and half‐siblings in divorced families, widowed families, and single‐parent families. Background Siblings are one of the most stable sources of attachment and companionship over the life course and function as important providers of practical and emotiona...

Return migration is a complex process increasingly discussed in academic and policy circles. This study calls on complementary concepts and theories of migration, such as transnationalism, integration and family ties, to explore the return migration aspirations of first‐generation immigrants in the Netherlands. It aims to examine to what extent an...

The economic consequences of divorce and separation for women are commonly associated with the chronic strain model, according to which women's losses are large and persistent. This research note shifts the focus to a crisis model highlighting women's potential of, and routes to, recovery from initial losses. Drawing on German Socio-Economic Panel...

Most studies of discrepancies in parents’ reports about children’s psychological problems address younger children and psychological problems. The current contribution shifts the focus to adult children and to well-being. In adult intergenerational relationships, knowledge of children’s well-being is more uncertain and there is more room for disagr...

Moving in adolescence could be a stressful experience, potentially disturbing development into adulthood. This study investigated the relationship between residential mobility in adolescence and life satisfaction in young adulthood, focusing on moving timing, frequency, and distance, using (retrospective) longitudinal German survey data (N = 2998,...

This report presents a new data set that can be used for describing long-term social and demographic change in the Netherlands.

Objective This paper examines how parents' socioeconomic status (SES) affects the support parents give to children and how parents' SES moderates changes in support across children's life courses. Background Many studies have documented effects of parents' SES on support to adult children, as well as effects of children's life course stages on rec...

Prior studies have examined why people emigrate from their country of birth during retirement. By focusing on describing motives for international retirement migration, these studies overlook what inhibits or enables people to have particular motives to migrate. We collected data from a representative sample of Dutch nationals aged 66–90 who were b...

The institutionalization hypothesis argues that in contexts where divorce is more common, its consequences will be less severe. An implication of this hypothesis is that the association between parental divorce and child outcomes will decline over time, parallel to the historical rise in divorce. Building on a handful of earlier tests of this idea,...

Background: In the last few decades, a substantial number of older adults have migrated to new countries around the retirement age to raise their quality of life, a phenomenon that has been labeled as international retirement migration. The scattered body of research on this type of migration across disciplines has made it difficult to get an overv...

Many studies have shown that the relationship between nonresidential fathers and their children in youth has a lasting influence on their relationship in adulthood. Comparatively less is known about the process through which divorce affects father–child relationships. We assess if and how the divorce circumstances of interparental conflict, the pre...

Public policies encourage later retirement, but they often do not account for discrepancies in the capacity for extending working lives. This paper studies trends and inequalities in extending working lives between 1990 and 2019 from gender and education perspectives in seven countries (Australia, Germany, Russia, South Korea, Switzerland, United K...

Objective We examined how adult (step)parent–child closeness is associated to the quality of other ties in the family network (i.e., parent–child dyads, parent–parent dyads). Background Although stepfamily scholars often assume that there are associations between all dyads within a family unit, more research needs to examine this premise empirical...

In tegenstelling tot het gezegde dat je oude bomen niet moet verplanten blijkt dit niet te gelden voor pensioenmigranten. Nieuw onderzoek leert dat de meeste pensioenmigranten in het eerste jaar na hun migratie niet veel serieuze problemen hebben ervaren en zich over het algemeen gelukkiger achten dan voordat ze emigreerden.

Vertrokken vroeger gepensioneerden bij hoge uitzondering, tegenwoordig kijkt men niet meer op van pensionado's die verhuizen naar het buitenland. Bij de keuze om te emigreren spelen vele zaken een rol. Mensen worden aangetrokken door beter weer of door de rust en natuur, anderen vertrekken omdat ze niet meer tevreden zijn in Nederland.

Background: Little is known about how the negative effect of parental divorce on father-child relations has changed over time. Existing cohort studies do not contain questions on father-child relationships after divorce and the investigated time period is often short. Objective: The aim of this study is to describe long-term changes in the associat...

We examined the importance of adult children’s ties with biological parents and stepparents for well-being in adulthood. We particularly focused on situations in which adult children are not close with the new partner of their biological parent, their stepparent. Following balance theory, it is straining to be in an unbalanced pattern (i.e., close...

This report describes a data collection among Dutch retirement migrants in 40 foreign countries and the way to analyze the data.

Life satisfaction is crucial for healthy development into adulthood. However, it is yet largely unknown how life satisfaction develops in the transition to adulthood. This study examined life satisfaction development in this transition and paid special attention to differences between boys, girls, children of immigrants, and nonimmigrants. Unique l...

Many studies have documented that health behaviors are transmitted from parents to children. Due to the rise in divorce and remarriage, the context of intergenerational transmission has changed. Using a national multi-actor survey from the Netherlands, the impact of parents' health behaviors on children was compared in different types of families....

This paper tested the sometimes suggested but rarely tested idea that local ties are more important for migrants than for natives. Using nationally representative data from the Netherlands Longitudinal Lifecourse Study on first- and second-generation Turkish and Moroccan migrants aged 18–45 in the Netherlands in 2009 (N = 1607) and a comparison gro...

Public policies encourage later retirement, but they often do not account for discrepancies in the capacity for extending working lives. This paper studies trends and inequalities in extending working lives over the last three decades in a gender-specific and comparative perspective of seven countries (Australia, Germany, Russia, South Korea, Switz...

It has been argued that an increase in the number of siblings means that there are fewer parental investments made per child (resource dilution hypothesis). Yet, these studies are mostly based on biological two-parent families in which it can be assumed that parental resources are distributed more or less equally across siblings. This assumption do...

In many Western countries, coresidential unions of lower educated people are less stable than those of higher educated people. A prominent explanation of this gradient in union dissolution holds that the lower educated experience more strain. Evidence for this explanation has been limited by a focus on only the economic dimension of strain and on o...

Virtually, all large-scale family surveys in the United States and Europe have yielded a positive view of family ties in contemporary societies. The present study examines whether surveys like these are affected by selective nonresponse. Are people with negative family ties less likely to participate in surveys, and if so, to what extent does this...

Objective This research describes the attitudes that people have toward biological and nonbiological parenting and examines how living arrangements during youth affect people's attitudes as adults. Background It is generally believed that people have negative beliefs about nonbiological (i.e., step) family relationships, but there is little system...

Competing claims exist about how the geographic distance between parents and their adult children has changed historically. A classic modernisation hypothesis is that people currently live further away from their parents than in the past. Others have argued for stability and the remaining importance of local family ties, in spite of a long‐term dec...

There are large cross‐national differences in the age of leaving home. The literature offers cultural, economic, and institutional explanations for these differences but has not examined all three explanations in one study. We examine these three explanations using data of the European Social Survey (ESS) from 2002 to 2016, supplemented with year‐s...

The Comparative Panel File (CPF) harmonizes the world’s largest and longest-running household panel surveys from seven countries: Australia (HILDA), Germany (SOEP), United Kingdom (BHPS and UKHLS), South Korea (KLIPS), Russia (RLMS), Switzerland (SHP), and the United States (PSID). The project aims to support the social science community in the ana...

This study contrasts adult and child perspectives on divorce and separation. Based on harmonized retrospective life history data from eight European countries, we study the risk of divorce and separation from the perspective of adult unions and the perspective of children born into these unions. The analysis connects adult and child perspectives, f...

The Comparative Panel File (CPF) harmonises the world's largest and longest-running household panel surveys from seven countries: Australia (HILDA), Germany (SOEP), Great Britain (BHPS and UKHLS), South Korea (KLIPS), Russia (RLMS), Switzerland (SHP), and the United States (PSID). The project aims to support the social science community in the anal...

Objectives: Multi-actor data show that parents' and adult children's evaluations of their relation do not necessarily match. We studied disagreement in parent- and child-reported closeness, comparing parent-child dyads involving separated parents, non-separated parents, and stepparents to shed new light on today's diverse landscape of adult parent...

Objective This study examined the role of stepfamily experiences on early home‐leaving with detailed measures for stepfamily experiences that capture levels of closeness and conflict, and with a detailed measure for home‐leaving that captures pathways out of the home. Background Young adults raised in stepfamilies leave home and form unions earlie...

We address two key research questions. First, is there an association between parental separation and living with a stepparent in childhood and maladjustment in adulthood? Second, we examine the role conflict plays in these associations. We study whether parental union dissolution is only detrimental in cases of heightened post-divorce interparenta...

Objective We examined adult children's concurrent ties to biological fathers and stepfathers. Three mechanisms potentially determining the strength of father‐child and stepfather‐child ties were tested, namely, investment, interdependence, and substitution. Background As most research studied father‐child and stepfather‐child ties separately, our...

We examined a possible predictor of (step)parent-adult child closeness in adulthood, namely, the frequency of parental involvement in different child-rearing tasks during youth. We expected that although involvement in children's lives would be important for the strength of all intergenerational ties, it would be particularly important for steppare...

Guilt is believed to be a common emotion in personal relationships. Few studies, however, have examined if guilt plays a role in the divorce process. The present chapter uses unique nationally representative survey data which included questions on the extent to which parents have feelings of guilt toward their (young or adult) children (N = 3,203)....

This study goes beyond a purely financial perspective to explain why single older workers prefer to retire later than their partnered counterparts. We aim to show how the work (i.e., its social meaning) and home domain (i.e., spousal influence) contribute to differences in retirement preferences by relationship status. Analyses were based on multia...

The interdependence between partners raises considerable interest in the sociology of life course, work and families. Partner influences play a particularly important role in the work domain, because each partner’s work decisions have profound effects on the couple as a whole. In contrast to previous research, this study pays detailed attention to...

Objective: This study examines the intergenerational transmission of socioeconomic status among people who have a biological father as well as a stepfather. In particular, this study investigates how the relative importance of biological fathers and stepfathers in the transmission process depends on the time in coresidence, postdivorce contact freq...

As a result of the divorce revolution, more children grow up in complex families. Yet, we know little about how family complexity affects relationships when children are adults and parents are ageing. In this article, we use unique survey data to test fundamental ideas about intergenerational ties: the role of biology, partnerships (marriage and co...

In order to understand the interdependency between intergenerational and adult sibling relationships, a family systems perspective is applied to identify a smaller—empirically analyzable—relational unit of analysis, that is, the sibling–parent–sibling triad. Using balance theory, triadic configurations are derived that represent enhancement, compen...

There has been debate about whether the flow of intergenerational support reverses as parents age. One view is that in western countries, parents remain ‘net donors’ to children, even in very old age. Such a conclusion coincides with notions of parental altruism and would be in contrast to notions of exchange and reciprocity over the life course. T...

An ample body of research has shown that young adults from non-intact families are more likely to leave the parental home at an early age than young adults from intact families. However, little is known about the mechanisms underlying this relationship. We drew on prospective longitudinal data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP) to ex...

Objective This study offers a new approach to off‐time transitions and applies it to the link between leaving and returning home. Background It is no longer uncommon for young adults to return after having left the parental home. Previous research has mostly examined returning home in isolation from leaving home, although these two transitions are...

Growing up in Diverse Societies provides a comprehensive analysis of the integration of the children of immigrants in England, Germany, the Netherlands, and Sweden, based on the ‘Children of immigrants longitudinal survey in four European countries’ (CILS4EU), including harmonised interviews with almost 19,000 14- to 15-year-olds. The book studies...

Previous studies have shown that family ties are relatively strong in most non-western immigrant groups in Europe. This paper focuses on differences within the immigrant population and examines how cultural and social aspects of integration affect the relationships that adult children have with their parents. The study is based on survey data with...

Employing Dutch longitudinal information on 1250 second-generation Moroccan and Turkish migrants we investigate cultural assimilation using attitude questions on marriage and sexuality (including measures of homophobia). Two theoretical approaches guide our analyses. First, it is expected that the family of origin may push migrants in a more conser...

This study investigates the relationship between retirement and self-rated health, and how this relationship is moderated by experienced pre-retirement physical job demands and psychological job stress. Two waves of Dutch panel data are analysed, collected between 2003 and 2007, which include information on 819 people who retired between waves and...

Using large-scale, representative survey data from the 1999, 2003 and 2007 waves of Aanvullende Voorzieningengebruik Onderzoek (AVO) we study trends in educational homogamy for the Netherlands between 1960 and 2010. Prior studies for the Netherlands focused on relative homogamy, the tendency to marry within the group given the supply of marriage ca...

Although from a life course perspective women’s retirement timing can be expected to be related to family events earlier in life, such as childbirth and divorce, empirical insights into these relationships are limited. Drawing on three-wave panel data, collected in 2001, 2006–2007, and 2011 among Dutch female older workers (n = 420) and if applicab...

The transmission of individual characteristics and behaviors across generations has frequently been studied in the social sciences. For a growing number of children, however, the biological father was present in the household for only part of the time; and for many children, stepfathers were present. What are the implications of these changes for t...

Using retrospective survey data collected in the Netherlands in 2012, the author examined how childhood circumstances moderate the effect of an early parental divorce on relationships between fathers and adult children. Using adult children's reports about the frequency of contact and the quality of the relationship, he found strong negative effect...

This study focuses on the partner choices of immigrant adolescents who are involved in a romantic relationship. We formulate hypotheses about the effect of immigrants' preferences, parental influence and structural effects of the school and neighbourhood on the likelihood of dating a native partner versus a non-native partner. Using unique data fro...

Objectives: Studies have shown that a parental divorce has a negative effect on parent-child relations. This study examines how adult children's divorce affects the amount of contact children have with older parents, making a distinction between the effects of being single on the one hand and the effects of divorce on the other hand. Method: Usi...

This study describes and explains parental involvement in partner choice among Turkish and Moroccan immigrants in the Netherlands. It thus contributes to previous research on third-party influence on partner choice. The study provides quantitative findings on the actual extent of parental involvement in partner choice among immigrant groups compare...

This chapter gives an overview of research on the relationships between parents and their adult, grown-up children. Interest in intergenerational ties has increased again as a result of the aging of Western societies. The chapter discusses the following topics in the literature: (i) the degree to which parents and children care for each other's wel...

We use the British Cohort Study to investigate to what extent parental resources moderate the association between parental divorce in childhood and lowered child well-being as indicated by maternal reports of child psychological well-being and by academic test scores (reading and math tests). We argue that children of mothers with more years of edu...

The authors compared male and female same-sex and different-sex couples in the Netherlands with respect to age and educational homogamy. Because many same-sex couples in the Netherlands are married, differences between married and cohabiting couples were analyzed for all 3 groups. Analyses of data from the Dutch Labor Force Surveys 2001–2007 (N = 1...

Although from a life course perspective women’s retirement timing can be expected to be related to family events earlier in life, such as childbirth and divorce, empirical insights into these relationships are limited. Drawing on three-wave panel data, collected in 2001, 2006-2007, and 2011 among Dutch female older workers (N=420) and if applicable...

Purpose of the Study: Although the process of adjustment to retirement is often assumed to be related to experiences earlier in life, quantitative empirical insights regarding these relationships are limited. This study aims to improve our understanding of adjustment to the loss of the work role, by conceptualizing retirement as a multidimensional...

This work examines what role children play in the re-partnering process in five European countries (Norway, France, Germany, Romania, and the Russian Federation) by addressing the following research questions: (1) To what extent do men and women differ in their re-partnering chances?; (2) Can gender differences in re-partnering be explained by the...

This article examines the effect of composition of friendship networks during early adolescence on the likelihood of entering an interethnic union among the children of immigrants. We analyze the panel data from the Children of Immigrants Longitudinal Study that followed 14-year-olds into their early 20s. We extend previous research by simultaneous...

The author compared the strength of the relationships that adult children have with different types of parents: biological parents who remained married, stepparents, and biological parents who divorced. He analyzed Dutch life history data containing detailed measures of living arrangements and used multilevel models to make comparisons both between...

Retirement is an event that often brings about great changes in a person's personal and social life. For many people, work is not only a way to fill time and earn money, but also important for their identity and meaning in life. After retirement, these benefits of work are lost, and it is expected that people will seek substitutes for this loss. Th...

Previous research has suggested that a new marriage gradient has emerged in the United States, with marriage becoming increasingly the privilege of the better-educated. This article examines whether this is true for Europe and explores differences in the marriage gradient among 25 European countries, using multilevel models. The focus is on the cha...

New data from a national Dutch survey are used to examine the effects of divorce and repartnering on the relationships that fathers have with their adult children. Compared with divorced fathers who live alone, repartnered fathers have less frequent contact with their children, they exchange less support with them, and the quality of the relationsh...

The specialization theory from Gary Becker is often used to explain the effect of women’s work on the risk of divorce. The main argument is that women with little work experience have higher economic costs to exit marriage. Using the Fertility and Family Surveys, we test for 16 countries to what extent women’s employment increases the risk of separ...

The specialization theory from Gary Becker is often used to explain the effect of women’s work on the risk of divorce. The main argument is that women with little work experience have higher economic costs to exit marriage. Using the Fertility and Family Surveys, we test for 16 countries to what extent women’s employment increases the risk of separ...

Objectives: Even though in retirement and career theories reference is made to a preretirement work disengagement process among older workers, quantitative empirical knowledge about this process is limited. The aim of this study is to improve our understanding of work disengagement in the preretirement period, by examining the impact of proximity...

In this paper, we focus on childbearing after the dissolution of the first marital union. The discussion of what drives fertility decisions after dissolution has been largely dominated by the arguments that: (a) people want to have a child as a way to achieve the adult status of parenthood (the "parenthood hypothesis"), and that (b) a shared child...

Objectives: Using a within-family perspective, we examine how mothers allocate support among their adult children, and we test alternative theories about support exchange. Method: We use a large-scale multiactor survey from the Netherlands in which mothers and children were interviewed independently. We analyze sibling pairs (aged 36 on average)...

Using large-scale panel data, this paper examines how social contacts change across the life course. Fixed-effects regression models are used to ascertain within-person changes over a 12-year period. The models show that marriage does not affect weaker ties whereas it does change the nature of the stronger ties that people have: friendships become...

A common claim in the literature is that higher-educated persons are more likely to marry outside their ethnic/racial group than lower-educated persons. We re-examine this “educational gradient” with a multilevel analysis of 46 immigrant groups in the Current Population Survey. We find that there are positive effects not only of individual educatio...

Objectives Many studies have examined how equity in personal relationships affects mental health and well-being. Often, such studies use measures based on how people perceive the balance in a relationship. In this study, the reverse causal path is studied, from well-being to perceived equity. The expectation is that depressed mood would lead to mor...

Using national representative survey data from the Netherlands, this article examines the effects of a parental divorce in childhood on relationships between adult children and their parents. Using a within-family design, we make comparisons between fathers and mothers within the same family. Our approach in part not only replicates earlier finding...

This paper studies the effect of the division of labor within households on husbands’ and wives’ depressive symptoms. Economic theory argues that specialization enhances mental health and wellbeing, whereas other, more psychological theories argue that equity matters most. We analyze data on husbands and wives from two waves of the National Survey...

How do children' s life course transitions affect the well-being of their parents? Using a large panel survey among parents with longitudinal information on 2 randomly chosen children, the authors analyzed the effects of children' s union formation, parenthood, and union dissolution on changes in depressive symptoms of parents. Negative effects wer...

Retirement is an event in life that often brings about great changes in a person’s personal and social life, but there is surprisingly little research into this matter. Theoretically, work can be viewed as an important role, providing identity and filling time. After retirement, this role is lost, and it is expected that people will seek substitute...

In debates about ageing western societies it is often assumed that many middle-aged women struggle to combine paid employment and intergenerational support, and that the subsequent stress leads them to experience an increase in depressive symptoms. Cross-sectional studies have supported this notion, but the question remains whether combining work a...