Mapping within-Family Perceived Disagreement in Six European Countries

Laura Leone , University of Oxford
Alessia Melegaro, Bocconi University

Family members tend to hold similar attitudes as a result of socialisation and shared environments. While researchers have usually focused on disagreement in terms of the distance between actual attitudes held by family members, perceived disagreement (i.e. distance from what we think others think) drives clustering and polarisation at the family level and is fundamental to understanding individual behaviours. In this project, we investigate patterns of perceived attitudinal disagreement with family members (children, siblings, parents, grandparents) across four heterogeneous attitude domains: vaccination, climate change, adoption rights for same-sex couples, and the impact of immigrants on the national economy. We use data from a cross-national, nationally representative survey conducted in Germany, Spain, France, Hungary, Italy and the UK between March and July 2024. Our objectives are (1) to uncover country-level patterns in perceived disagreement, and how they vary across topic and relationship, and (2) to explore micro-level correlates of heightened disagreement with family members, including socio-demographic, ideological and exposure-related factors. To answer the first research questions, we compute weighted means and standard errors of country level disagreement across topics and relationships. As for the micro-level analysis, we estimate distinct weighted linear regression with absolute disagreement within families as the outcome. We estimate both a pooled model including country fixed effects and separate models for each country to investigate possible heterogeneity in predictors’ effects. Overall, we argue that incorporating perceived disagreement into comparative research can sharpen our understanding of how families operate in different cultural contexts.

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 Presented in Session P2. Families, Fertility, and the Life Course 2