The primary goal of inter-generational mobility (IGM) research has always been to explain how and why social origins influence peoples’ life chances. This has naturally placed family attributes at centre stage. But the role of social institutions, most notably education systems, as a mediating...

The life cycle concept has come to have considerable prominence in Irish social policy debate. However, this has occurred without any systematic effort to link its usage to the broader literature relating to the concept. Nor has there been any detailed consideration of how we should set about...

Although relative income poverty rates vary from year to year, the rankings of different industrialised countries according to these poverty measures tend to be rather stable. Ireland is consistently among a group of countries with relative income poverty rates considerably above the European...

In this paper we make use of the Irish component of the European Union Community Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) survey for 2004 in order to develop a measure of consistent poverty that overcomes some of the difficulties associated with the original indicators employed as...

The idea that social support can act as a buffer against the negative consequences of stress has been a particularly influential one. Most of the relevant research has focused on the impact of life events. In this paper we direct attention to the impact of chronic economic stress on...

Rising levels of urban deprivation and a perception that poverty has become more concentrated in such areas and has taken on a qualitatively different character have provoked a variety of popular and academic responses. The potentially most fruitful set of hypotheses focus on the unintended...