Longitudinal and Life Course Studies最新文献

Purpose: This study investigates the dynamic interaction between career aspirations and family planning decisions among women in Lagos State, Nigeria. It explores how societal norms, personal ambitions and practical considerations influence these choices, using the Work-Family Conflict Theory as a guiding framework.

Method: Employing a qualitative research approach, a diverse group of 30 women in their reproductive years were selected from Lagos Island Maternity Hospital (LIMH) and Lagos University Teaching Hospital (LUTH) using a combination of purposive and snowball sampling techniques. Thematic content analysis was used to analyse their perspectives.

Results: The findings reveal that women with ambitious career goals often delayed childbearing to avoid career interruptions, reflecting a shift towards viewing career success as compatible with family life. However, health considerations sometimes supersede career ambitions, indicating a complex interplay between work, health and family planning. Contextual factors such as societal norms and workplace support systems also play a role in shaping family planning decisions. Women in self-employment experience greater flexibility in managing both careers and families, whereas those in traditional employment face more rigid constraints. Supportive workplace policies, particularly maternity leave provisions, emerge as critical in facilitating family planning decisions. Self-employed women emphasise the autonomy they gain in managing family planning, while those in structured employment often navigate stricter timelines.

Conclusion: There is a need to align family planning policies with women's career goals, and future research should explore these dynamics in diverse settings.

Background: The U-shaped relationship between age and life satisfaction has been well documented in developed contexts, such as the Western developed world and urban China, but lifespan changes in life satisfaction in less developed contexts, such as rural China, remain underexplored.

Data and method: Applying multilevel growth curve models to a longitudinal dataset (2006, 2009 and 2014 waves) of 1,959 rural Chinese, the overall pattern of life satisfaction across individuals of different ages at baseline, as well as changes in life satisfaction as individuals age, are investigated.

Results: Results show that in rural China, the overall pattern of life satisfaction across different ages at baseline resembles a J-shape, with the lowest point occurring at a much earlier age (21), compared to midlife, as observed in Western societies and urban China. In terms of longitudinal changes, individuals aged 18 to 45 at baseline experience a deterioration in life satisfaction over time, with younger individuals experiencing a faster decline, while for those aged 46 and above at baseline, life satisfaction shows an increase over time, with older individuals experiencing more improvements over the eight-year interval.

Conclusions: In rural China, young adults experience the lowest level of life satisfaction at baseline. Longitudinally, their life satisfaction further declines the most over the next eight years. Therefore, more targeted policies and support systems should be developed to improve the life satisfaction for young adults in rural China, not only for the present but also over the long term, ultimately contributing to the improvement of societal wellbeing in rural China.

Most research on marriage and well-being only looks at current marital status, which fails to address the impact of the timing and sequence of marital events on well-being. To fill in this gap, we use data from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) and China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study (CHARLS) to investigate the relationship between marital histories over the life course and loneliness and social participation in late life among older adults aged 65 and over across the US and China, and the gender differences therein. We show that marital histories are associated with loneliness and social participation differently across countries. Off-time marital transition is associated with worse socio-emotional well-being than on-time transition, represented by the higher likelihood of loneliness among Chinese widowed prematurely. On-time transition, featured by mid-life divorce in the US, is otherwise linked to less loneliness. We find weak evidence of gendered differences in the US, such that premature widowhood is linked to higher participation in leisure activities than friend visits for US women but not men. Lifelong singlehood, otherwise, is associated with lower odds of attending leisure activities than friend visits for US men but not women. Our findings reveal the associations between marital histories, including the states and transitions, and the socio-emotional well-being of older adults from three interconnected theories: the life course paradigm, the normative transition theory and the 'gender-as-relational' theory. We also highlight the importance of studying holistic marital histories (rather than current marital status) and their socio-psychological consequences over the life course, with particular attention to non-normative marital transitions that standardised measures of marital status tend to overlook.

Longitudinal methodology is a powerful study design that focuses on processes and patterns of change; yet it is rarely deployed in research to understand post-conflict circumstances. This article describes experiences and lessons learned from a longitudinal study of an education intervention programme in a post-conflict setting. It illustrates both challenges and successful mitigation strategies for conducting a longitudinal study in a fragile and demanding research environment. Our study identified both methodological (participant recruitment, attrition, contextual variability, instrument modifications and record-keeping) and contextual (community, environmental, security and civil perturbations) challenges that impact longitudinal studies in post-conflict societies. By describing the challenges and successful strategies employed in this longitudinal research study, the article illustrates how researchers and practitioners can utilise this methodology to capture individual change over time, identify impacts and outcomes, and gain a deeper understanding of social phenomena and individual development in post-conflict societies.

There is evidence linking performing gender norms to psychosocial and behavioural health status. However, no study has explored the trajectory of performing gender norms among adolescents and how it relates to their psychological and behavioural health outcomes. Our study addressed this gap in research. We utilised longitudinal data from the Taiwan Youth Project, spanning from 2000 to 2013, and constructed a gender-typed behaviour and attitudinal scale to represent individual levels of gender performance. Outcomes were perceived unhealthiness, felt unhappiness, depressive symptomatology and deviant behaviours. A gender-based trajectory model (GBTM) was created using multi-wave data, categorising young adolescents into three groups, which include 10.3 per cent who demonstrated persistently low gender-conforming behaviours, 46.1 per cent who transitioned from low-to-high gender-conforming behaviours, and 43.5 per cent who consistently exhibited high gender-conforming behaviours. Poisson regression analysis was employed to examine the relationship between the GBTM and outcomes. We found that persistently low (RR: 1.05; 95 per cent CI: 1.00-1.09, p=0.030) and low-to-high gender-conforming behaviours (RR: 1.03; 95 per cent CI: 1.00-1.10, p=0.032) were associated with a higher risk of depressive symptomatology compared to persistently high gender-conforming behaviours. Furthermore, low-to-high gender-conforming individuals had a significantly lower risk of deviant behaviours (RR: 0.97; 95 per cent CI: 0.90-0.99, p=0.034) than those with consistently high gender-conforming behaviours. This study expands the current literature and provides novel evidence regarding longitudinal changes in gender performance in developing adolescents. Findings underscore potential adverse psychological and behavioural outcomes among individuals with persistently low-performing gender conformity.

This is a reply to 'Re-considering "impact" for longitudinal social science research: towards more scientific approaches to theorising and measuring the influence of cohort studies' by Charis Bridger Staatz, Evangeline Tabor and Dylan Kneale. Should the impact of longitudinal studies include wider dimensions compared to how research impact is defined by the Research Excellence Framework (REF)? The authors argue that this is because there are some unique challenges faced by longitudinal studies in generating and measuring impact. In particular impact can't just be tracked through physical documents and citations. The temporal nature of the studies means looking beyond individual pieces of research to understand the emerging themes in a body of work, and considering the impact of those themes. They also make the case that not all impact has to be economic or policy driven, and here the capacity building contribution of the studies within academia is vital. Both those findings are welcome. REF needs to better reflect the actual contribution of long-term social science studies, particularly as part of UK's data infrastructure. However, the impact of longitudinal studies is not simply constrained by design but also by short-termism in policy making, and the slow progress made on prevention policy across difference domains of life.

Meaningful participation in occupations or employment and/or the ability to engage in societal roles holds significant implications for one's wellbeing and is internationally recognised as a fundamental right for all persons, nowadays representing an emerging policy-making goal. We aimed to identify novel classes of individuals with chronic spinal cord injury (SCI) having similar long-term trajectories of community integration and relate them to their demographic and clinical features using a retrospective observational design. Community Integration Questionnaire (CIQ) follow-up assessments, motor Functional Independence Measure (mFIM) categorised as poor, fair or good, and Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale (HADS) were analysed. Growth mixture models (GMM) were fitted to identify individuals with similar CIQ trajectories, classes' predictors were identified using multivariate logistic regression. GMM identified three classes of trajectories of community-dwelling adults with SCI (n=238) living in Catalonia, Spain assessed in-person (between 2002 and 2022) up to 19 years post-injury: Class 1 (n=46, 19.3 per cent): male (56.5 per cent), aged 53.5 (16.6) years at injury, mFIM (poor 39.1 per cent, fair 23.9 per cent, good 37.0 per cent), mean total CIQ=9.9 (3.4), depressive (21.7 per cent), tetraplegia (39.1 per cent). Class 2 (n=41, 17.3 per cent): male (56.1 per cent), 57.4 (14.8) years at injury, mFIM (poor 26.8 per cent, fair 12.2 per cent, good 61.0 per cent), CIQ=9.3 (3.8), depressive (7.3 per cent), paraplegia (65.9 per cent). Class 3 (n=151, 63.4 per cent): male (68.9 per cent), 43.6 (15.9) years at injury, mFIM (poor 11.9 per cent, fair 13.9 per cent, good 74.2 per cent), CIQ=17.7 (3.3), depressive (4.0 per cent), paraplegia (74.2 per cent). Admission age, higher education (university), mFIM and HADS depression predict good community integration, AUC: 0.82 (0.73-0.91). Our results suggest possible course of action focusing on specific aspects to promote community integration.

Background: It is known that children with lower neurodevelopmental abilities and children who live in poverty are at increased risk of contact with the criminal justice system, but whether these two risk factors interact is unknown.

Methods: We used linked data from 519,920 children born in 2001/2002, who attended school in England. Prospective analysis tested whether Early Years Foundation Stage Profile (EYFSP) indexing functional development across six domains and pupil characteristics indexing poverty at age 4/5, predicted a caution or conviction by age 15/16.

Findings: Higher scores on the EYFSP (indicating better functional development) were associated with decreased odds of a caution or conviction by the age of 15/16. Being eligible for Free School Meals (living in absolute poverty) at age 4/5 was associated with increased odds of having a caution or conviction by age 15/16. There was a statistical interaction indicating synergistic risk conferred by these two risk factors.

Interpretation: Poverty and lower functional development independently confer risk of criminalisation, and together confer a 'double disadvantage'. Structural public health interventions should reduce the criminalisation of children by boosting functional development through Special Educational Needs support in schools, and by reducing the number of children living in absolute poverty.