The diversity of pathways to adulthood in France: Evidence from a holistic approach

Youth is often depicted as a transition from childhood to adulthood in the familial, residential and occupational domains. This approach brings in the idea of thresholds, such as leaving the parental home, getting married, having a first child or having a stable job. In practice, it has the advantage of allowing relatively simple comparisons of pathways to adulthood in time and space. However the study of thresholds has several limitations. First, it masks the problem of the reversibility of events, their non-occurrence and the difficulty of defining clearly bounded markers. Second, it barely apprehends the links between the familial, residential and occupational domains. Finally, it produces aggregated outcomes, partly ignoring the heterogeneity of individual processes of transition to adulthood. This work attempts to overcome these limitations by tackling pathways to adulthood in France through trajectory typologies built by means of optimal matching analysis techniques.