Siblings and life transitions: investigating the resource dilution hypothesis across historical contexts and outcomes.

This special section contains a collection of articles that study how children are affected by their sibship size and composition by examining their influence on several demographic outcomes across time and space. The importance of the specific historical context, as put forward by the conditional or gendered resource dilution model, seems to be justified, as inheritance practices and gender preferences were determining demographic outcomes.While these studies provide us with the possibility of reflecting on what kinds of pathways/mechanisms are behind sibling effects, they also demonstrate that much more can and should be investigated.Four recommendations for future studies are formulated: (1) future studies should continue on the same path as the articles in this special section and address different outcomes in a variety of contexts to determine under which conditions siblings matter for life transitions and demographic outcomes; (2) theoretical frameworks from different disciplines should be integrated to increase knowledge exchange; (3) researchers should think more about, and be transparent about, how siblings and families are defined; and (4) qualitative studies should be included to a greater extent, since quantitative studies alone cannot answer the questions we have about how and why sibling effects influence life transations and outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]