Transition to adulthood and the intergenerational transmission of disadvantages among young adults in Spain

Family sociologists have slowly begun to recognize the importance of the intersection of social categories of (dis)advantage for demographic outcomes and for their intergenerational transmission. Debates on how to operationalize these intersections using quantitative data are still open. We use the concepts of social space and probable social classes to contribute to this debate focusing on Spain, a country with very high mean ages of leaving parental home, marital union formation, and childbearing. We use the 2018 Spanish National Fertility Survey to study how transition to adulthood is intertwined with the intersection of social categories of (dis)advantage, including family background, income levels, housing access, occupation, educational attainment, and place of birth. We supplement this analysis with a study of the intergenerational transmission of (dis)advantages focusing on how the intersection of social categories influences the likelihood of experiencing negative birth outcomes and complications during delivery among first births from 2018 to 2020. We show that structural and intertwined constraints affect the Spanish population potentially differently, and we describe the family and inequality processes that underlie divergent patterns of transition to adulthood.