Absence of educational history in analysis of events related to transition to adult life

Resumen

Generally, in studies that intend to explain effects of education on behaviors related to the transition to adulthood, the most used variable is the highest level of education attained by the time of the interview. Unfortunately, this leads to extreme simplification of the education histories of people and does not allow to know with certainty when exactly they finished their studies, if they did so in a satisfactory way and/or if they had interruptions of their studies. So, in this work we investigate some of the problems originating from having an incomplete educational history when analyzing events of the transition to adult life, such as: leaving the parental home, first union and becoming a parent. For the empirical analysis, we use the Fertility and Family Survey (ffs) for four countries: Austria, Latvia, Sweden and Spain.