Satu Helske
 PhD


satu.helske@utu.fi

+358 29 450 4105

+358 50 473 8462

Assistentinkatu 7

Turku

Office484


ORCID identifierhttps://orcid.org/0000-0003-0532-0153

PREDLIFE research consortium




Areas of expertise
inequality; work and family; (fathers') parental leave; life course; longitudinal research; sequence analysis; Markovian models

Research community or research topic
PI of the SHARELEAVE project, Co-PI of the REGPARENT project

Biography

I am a Docent in sociology (equivalent to Habilitation) and hold a PhD in statistics. I work as Collegium Researcher for the Turku Institute of Advanced Studies (TIAS) at the INVEST Research Flagship Centre, Faculty of Social Sciences. I lead a research team focusing on causes and consequences of fathers' parental leave.

I completed my PhD in statistics at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland, in 2016. Following my PhD I worked as a postdoctoral researcher, first at the Department of Sociology at the University of Oxford, UK, and then at the Institute for Analytical Sociology at Linköping University, Sweden.



Research

My main interests lie in intergenerational and life course research, especially employment and family dynamics and causes and consequences of (father's) parental leave. I am also interested in longitudinal research methods, especially sequence analysis and related methods.

I lead the project “Parental Leave in Context: Social Drivers of Sharing Care” (SHARELEAVE), funded by the Research Council of Finland (2025–2029). The aim of the project is to investigate socioeconomic differences in the use of parental leave: how parents share parental leave and how their social environments influence their leave use. The project examines typical and atypical use of parental leave among different population groups and how parental leave use has changed over the years and in various social environments: in workplaces, residential areas, and extended family networks.

In addition, together with Anna Erika Hägglund, I co-lead the project “Variation in parents’ division of parental leave across regions and language groups in Finland" (REGPARENT), funded by the Swedish Cultural Foundation in Finland. The project examines parental leave use in Finnish- and Swedish-speaking families in different regions of Finland.

In 2020–2024, I was the leader of the research consortium “Towards well-informed decisions: Predicting long-term effects of policy reforms on life trajectories" (PREDLIFE). The consortium involved sociologists from the INVEST flagship and statisticians from the University of Jyväskylä. In the project, we developed new methods and software for simulating the effects of legal changes (or other interventions), as well as for modelling extensive panel data, such as life course data, and for causal inference. In our sociological studies, we showed, for instance, that fathers’ use of parental leave was influenced not only by legal reforms but also by slower effects, such as “model learning” occurring in workplaces and residential environments.



Teaching

I teach statistical methods for social sciences.

Teaching in 2025–2026:

- Sequence Analysis and Markovian Models
- Introduction to Longitudinal and Multilevel Modelling.



Publications
  
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Last updated on 2025-02-09 at 02:19