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In the decades following World War II, Denmark created a safety net for its citizens and families, providing social welfare benefits such as free health services, university tuition, and elder care. The resulting low levels of inequality and high living standards have earned Denmark a reputation as one of the world’s happiest and most livable countries.
For researchers, the Danish system offers yet another benefit: a treasure trove of centralized, nationwide administrative data. Because the Danish government assigns every Danish resident a unique personal number that identifies them and their interactions with government and private institutions, researchers can access administrative information across sectors, from health and education to the criminal justice system, social welfare offices, and more.
A new study mines Denmark’s nationwide administrative database to test whether various health and social disadvantages tend to run in the same small segment of families and whether education disrupts the intergenerational transmission of these disadvantages. The authors, Signe Hald Andersen, deputy chief of research at the Rockwool Foundation Research Unit in Copenhagen; Leah S. Richmond-Rakerd, a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor; Terrie E. Moffitt, a professor of psychology at Duke University; and Avshalom Caspi, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke University, examined three generational cohorts, representing some 2.1 million Danish citizens, by linking data at the individual level and within families.
Whereas other researchers have sifted through the Danish data to study the intergenerational transmission of one specific disadvantage, the authors looked at several: poor mental health, poor physical health, social welfare dependence, criminal offenses, and the involvement of child protective services. By expanding the scope of disadvantage and obtaining information from school records to measure education, the authors spotlight high-priority individuals and suggest how the state and other actors might intervene to improve their outcomes and mitigate inequality in Danish society.
“This research makes innovative use of administrative data, helping us think about how we might make investment in public services more effective,” says Anna Vignoles, an education economist and the director of the Leverhulme Trust in London. “It does this by looking across multiple generations of the same family and asking whether some families persistently rely more on public services and whether there are ways of breaking this intergenerational cycle of deprivation.”
The authors found that numerous health and social disadvantages were concentrated within small segments of Danish society. Adults who appeared disproportionately in multiple administrative registers, or “high-need users” of health and social services, tended to have parents for whom that was also the case. They also had children who often showed up in protective services records.
“What’s especially important,” Richmond-Rakerd says, “is that we found that education disrupted the transmission of these disadvantages across generations. Offspring who completed secondary school were less likely to experience disadvantage themselves and were less likely to have children who appeared in protective services records.”
Through a sibling analysis, Richmond-Rakerd and her collaborators accounted for the influences of shared family background. Despite Denmark’s robust social welfare system, more than 25 percent of the study’s population did not complete secondary school. Individuals who received more education than siblings living in the same household tended to have better outcomes and transmit those improvements to their children.
The authors’ findings amplify the importance of supporting education and potentially vulnerable people to reduce health and social inequality. “In many developed countries, the portion of GDP being invested in education has remained stable, or is even rising, and globally, average years of education have increased,” Richmond-Rakerd says. “Thinking about education and these intergenerational processes also requires looking at the social context, or the societal expectations around education and the benefits afforded to those with more education.” Individuals with less education might become increasingly isolated within the high-need segment of society.
Given the increased potential for identification that comes with individually linked databases, Denmark’s administrative resources rely on high levels of public trust. In the United States, new initiatives to develop data resources might bring opportunities for researchers who study the processes that underlie health and social disparities to test the replicability of these findings, if the public trust gap can be bridged.
“This kind of multigeneration analysis is hard to do with survey data, given that attrition is a major problem in longitudinal surveys that are conducted over long periods of time,” Vignoles says.
Signe Hald Andersen, Leah S. Richmond-Rakerd, Terrie E. Moffitt, and Avshalom Caspi, “Nationwide Evidence That Education Disrupts the Intergenerational Transmission of Disadvantage,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 118, no. 31, 2021.
Read more stories by Daniela Blei.