Einstein Center Population Diversity

The Einstein Center for Population Diversity (ECPD) will study the consequences of increasing population diversity for social inequality and health disparities by focusing on the growing diversity of families, including changing conceptions and boundaries of the family itself. The family is a crucial, if not the primary, arena where inequalities are (re-)produced within and across generations, in and through the continuous interaction with social policy, the labor market, and educational institutions. Thus, changing family patterns and behavior are both a source of growing population diversity on the societal level and a driver of social inequality and wellbeing on the individual and household level. For example, when people get married, have children and divorce, they define the population structure. Union formation, marriage and union dissolution also have, however, immediate consequences for social
inequality, poverty, wellbeing and health of individuals and households. The strong relation between family patterns or family behavior and social inequality is maybe most obvious in the case of the large fraction of women who transit into poverty and welfare dependence after separation and divorce. It was also very evident during the COVID-19 pandemic, when families took over many tasks that are usually performed by the welfare state including care for children and care-dependent older adults. While this development was instrumental in maintaining key societal functions, it also put many families under intense pressure and strain, depending on the individual family constellation and its resources. The pandemic thus illustrates how families become the “place” where causes and consequences of population diversity and societal challenges play out. The ECPD will transcend disciplinary silos by linking biomedical sciences and social sciences to conduct collaborative research on the interrelations between family diversity, health, education, and social inequalities in aging societies. This will be done by a group of leading scholars in demography, sociology, medicine, psychology, and health sciences. The ECPD will be thus uniquely situated to
investigate the biological, psychological, social, and environmental pathways and mechanisms as well as their interrelations operating at the family level. To unravel the longitudinal nature of the intra- and intergenerational effects of diversity in family trajectories and patterns, the ECPD will be committed to a holistic life course approach. Further, as a cross-cutting theme, the ECPD will investigate the role of global and regional crises and their multiple relations with population and family diversity. We will combine household panel data and register-based information with biomarker and genetic data to better understand biosocial pathways along the life course.