Unequal Family and Employment Contexts for Children and Adolescents in Spain

Abstract Over recent decades, economic and social transformations have reshaped family structures and labour market dynamics across Western societies. In Spain, these shifts have intensified family and employment changes, disproportionately affecting children in socially disadvantaged groups. While previous research often examines these inequalities through single dimensions such as education or occupation, this paper adopts a multivariate approach to better capture the stratified exposure to instability. Using retrospective data from the 2018 Spanish Fertility Survey, we reconstruct parents’ family and employment trajectories from children’s perspective, covering the period from conception to age 18. We apply Multiple Correspondence Analysis and clustering techniques to identify “probable social classes”—distinct configurations of social (dis)advantage—and assess children’s exposure to family and parental employment changes across these groups using longitudinal entropy measures. Our findings offer two key contributions: first, the development of a multidimensional, data-driven model that captures the social stratification structure in Spain; second, empirical evidence of how intersecting social inequalities shape children’s differentiated exposure to family and parental employment changes.