Projecting Generational Placement Trajectories: Empirical and Simulated Populations in Norway

Much existing research in the demography of kinship focuses on quantifying the number and characteristics of living kin, such as age and sex. We know less about how individuals transition through different ‘generational placements’ over their life—for example, when and how long they are parents, children or experience overlap of multiple family generations. We use simulated micro-level data to project generational placement trajectories for life courses of the complete population of Norway born 1960 and 2000. Our microsimulations use age-specific fertility and mortality rates from 1846 to 2100. First, we benchmark projected trajectories for the 1960 cohort against observed trajectories from empirical register data from 1960 to 2019. Second, we project full life-course trajectories, from age 0 to 100, for the 1960 and 2000 cohorts. Results from sequence analysis show that generational placement trajectories efficiently capture individual-level heterogeneity in intergenerational kin availability and that results based on our simulated populations largely match those from empirical data. Over cohorts, typical generational placement trajectories will likely become more stable but “thinner”, with later (and shorter) demographic “(double) sandwiching” and increasingly frequent “fading family lines.” The analysis paves the path toward results on a global level and including projections for the future.