We are pleased to share our new working paper which introduces a novel questionnaire designed to improve the measurement of how family dynamics intersect with labour market risks, and how families’ responses are affected by care obligations for family members both in and outside of their home. The paper presents the rationale for and the design of the questionnaire. The questionnaire was also fielded through a Pilot Study in collaboration with The Social Study. This report describes the Pilot Study’s sample, objectives, and evaluation.
Regarding the motivation for the questionnaire, rEUsilience researchers Alzbeta Bartova and Wim Van Lancker (KU Leuven) highlight that current European cross-national surveys provide insufficient insight into the complexity of intra-household dynamics in the context of labour market risks and care responsibilities. Existing instruments often overlook non-traditional household structures, caregiving duties beyond childcare and care provided beyond the respondent’s household, as well as the complexities of how (financial) resources are accessed and shared within households. This questionnaire was developed to address these critical gaps and provide researchers with the means to analyse how intra-household arrangements mediate the effects of labour market risks.
The design of the questionnaire is rooted in a broad understanding of ‘resources’ and ‘care’, encompassing not only income and employment status, but also time, educational attainment, and social support networks available to provide informal care support. A central objective of the project was to create a tool that can identify the diverse caregiving arrangements and financial interdependencies that shape how families respond to labour market shocks. Importantly, the questionnaire is intended for use in cross-national research and was designed with comparability of individual research items in mind.
Furthermore, the questionnaire was designed by carefully integrating well-established, validated questions of existing data infrastructures with a selection of new questions addressing thematic areas that were identified as critical by prior research, but which are currently lacking in existing surveys. The three core modules of the questionnaire are household composition, caregiving responsibilities, and intra-household resource management. The first module expands ‘conventional’ household structures by including a wider range of family relationships, allowing researchers to detect multigenerational and extended household types. The second module focuses on care responsibilities, distinguishing between the care of young children and the support provided to adults who require help due to health limitations, disabilities, or illness. Questions in this section measure not only the type and frequency of care provided, but also the arrangements respondents make in case of an unexpected need or sudden change in their schedule. The third module investigates how income and financial decision-making are distributed within households. This module integrates items from the 2010 EU-SILC ad-hoc module on intra-household sharing of resources while at the same time targets the question on all respondents who did not live alone, unlike the ad-hoc module which limits these questions to couples. These questions therefore address gaps in the existing ad-hoc module, by broadening the understanding of individuals’ economic agency within households.
To evaluate both the operational feasibility and the substantive performance of the questionnaire, a pilot study was conducted in Belgium using The Social Study, a probability-based panel survey. Data was collected between January and February 2025, and the pilot achieved a response rate of 83.9%, with 2207 adults completing the questionnaire online or by paper in Dutch or French. The respondents in the sample are at least 18 years old and there was no upper bound age restriction.
The Pilot Study questionnaire was divided into five modules, focusing on (1) household composition through the FHT indicator and current economic activity of the respondent, (2) the childcare strategies parents with children under the age of 12 use, (3) care responsibilities for persons who need support or help due to age, illness or disability, (4) respondents with care responsibilities who do not work or work part-time, and (5) questions concerning respondents’ access to resources which aims to estimate the degree of their material deprivation that may be influenced by their care responsibilities.
In the evaluation of the Pilot Study, the questions were assessed by their comprehensibility for the respondents and the effectiveness of the new questions in capturing intended constructs, whereafter adjustments for application in future surveys are proposed.
This working paper is part of rEUsilience’s broader aim to enhance the understanding of how families in Europe use their resources to respond to labour market risks and how their responses are affected by care obligations for household members. By providing a more accurate picture of family dynamics and resource distribution, this questionnaire seeks to fill in the gap in current data sources by analysing the distribution of resources within households, the diversity of caregiving duties, and the informal support networks that shape economic resilience of families in all their diversity.
You can read the full paper, including the variable list, here.