Funded by an ERC starting grant (2025), QPaths provides unprecedented insights into the pathways and challenges faced by sexual minorities in achieving their family goals. Despite the growing acceptance of same-sex families and the expansion of their legal rights, they still face significant challenges in their decision to have children, particularly compared to their heterosexual counterparts. Yet, a critical gap remains in understanding these inequalities in family formation, as well as the specific barriers and support systems that shape these pathways. QPaths addresses these knowledge gaps through two interrelated parts.

The first part provides unparalleled demographic insights into family formation among sexual minorities by examining parenthood trajectories of individuals in same- and different-sex couples in Denmark, Finland, Norway, Sweden, and the Netherlands (1990-2022). This reveals inequalities in who can form and expand their family between same- and different-sex couples and breaks new ground on the role of institutional factors in shaping parental outcomes. With established access to population register data from five countries, the project can leverage the largest longitudinal, cross-national data source on same-sex relationships to date.

The second part studies the personal pathways behind these patterns by focussing on preferences, experiences, and behaviors in the family formation process of sexual minorities. Using insights from demography, sociology, psychology, and gender and sexuality studies, it develops a theoretical model that explains sexual minorities’ family formation process by identifying barriers unique to them. Conducting a large-scale, representative, longitudinal survey of individuals in same- and different-sex relationships allows us to study family formation over time and across sexual orientations. This results in a unique, open-access dataset on family formation among sexual minorities, offering valuable opportunities for future research into their family dynamics.

More information on the project and the start of the project will follow soon.