Longitudinal and Life Course Studies最新文献

Employment re-entry opportunities decrease with age. For middle-aged welfare benefit recipients, employment obstacles connected to age exacerbate further disadvantages connected to welfare receipt. At the same time, there is considerable diversity in middle-aged welfare benefit recipients' long-term employment trajectories, which has thus far received little attention. Policies aim to increase labour market participation at higher ages. To this end, it is important to understand specific difficulties and to be realistic when formulating goals for people with very diverse types of employment histories. Using large-scale register data, this paper's focus is on a cohort aged 45-54 in August 2012 in Germany. Sequence analysis aids in identifying characteristics relevant to employment histories over the past 19 years, from January 1993 to July 2012. Subsequent employment outcomes over the time span September 2012 to December 2018 are investigated, differentiating between jobs of different quality, and effects of training programmes on these outcomes are analysed using entropy balancing methods. Findings are that middle-aged welfare recipients' employment biographies are very diverse, ranging from very little employment experience, over long histories of intermittent employment, to long continuous employment histories. Employment history attributes significantly affect employment prospects. The analyses further show that it is not too late to invest in skills, independent of employment history type.

As school learning should enable people to self-determine their own lives, its long-lasting relevance for participation in further education is an essential outcome. Contemporary adult education research shows that beliefs and memories from one's school years have an impact on the motivation to pursue further education in working life. However, almost no longitudinal research exists that investigates the long-term forces behind adults' motivation to educate themselves. Hence, the present study examined whether students' learning-related behaviour, cognitions and emotions that developed in their school years are related to the subjective value they place on further education, their expectations of success in solving further learning tasks, and thus the likelihood of participating in further education. Corresponding structural equation analyses on data from the German panel study LifE (n = 1,110) revealed that the learning behaviour, ability self-concept and test anxiety at the age of 12, along with their individual change between the ages of 12 and 16, are associated in different ways with the attainment value and subjective costs placed on further education and expectations of success at the age of 35. In contrast, no influence of youth characteristics on the likelihood of participating in further education could be found. The findings indicate that especially the development of learning-related cognitions and emotions in secondary school is sustainably related to the individual's success expectancy and achievement value of further education. Long-term dependencies should be further investigated with regard to academic domains and socio-economic pathways.

Findings from longitudinal research, globally, repeatedly emphasise the importance of taking an early life course approach to mental health promotion; one that invests in the formative years of development, from early childhood to young adulthood, just prior to the transition to parenthood for most. While population monitoring systems have been developed for this period, they are typically designed for use within discrete stages (i.e., childhood or adolescent or young adulthood). No system has yet captured development across all ages and stages (i.e., from infancy through to young adulthood). Here we describe the development, and pilot implementation, of a new Australian Comprehensive Monitoring System (CMS) designed to address this gap by measuring social and emotional development (strengths and difficulties) across eight census surveys, separated by three yearly intervals (infancy, 3-, 6-, 9- 12-, 15-, 18 and 21 years). The system also measures the family, school, peer, digital and community social climates in which children and young people live and grow. Data collection is community-led and built into existing, government funded, universal services (Maternal Child Health, Schools and Local Learning and Employment Networks) to maximise response rates and ensure sustainability. The first system test will be completed and evaluated in rural Victoria, Australia, in 2022. CMS will then be adapted for larger, more socio-economically diverse regional and metropolitan communities, including Australian First Nations communities. The aim of CMS is to guide community-led investments in mental health promotion from early childhood to young adulthood, setting secure foundations for the next generation.

Among the many social characteristics that run in the family, education is one of the most strongly persistent. The long-term changes in educational reproduction within families and across generations and the gender-specific drivers of these changes remain partially unclear. Using population data for all Finnish siblings and their parents, we assessed the level of and trends in the intergenerational persistence of education among cohorts born between 1950 and 1989. The variance in education shared among siblings was 37% and remained stable over time. Parental education steadily increased its explanatory power in the shared variance, from 30% among cohorts born in the 1950s to 40% among cohorts born in the 1970s and 1980s. The direct contribution of maternal education net of paternal education for sibling similarity more than doubled across cohorts (from 5% in 1950 to 13% in 1989). The direct contribution of paternal education (10-12%) remained stable. Same-gender siblings resembled each other in education more closely than their opposite-gender counterparts. The growing importance of maternal education over time, which surpasses the predictive power of paternal education, demonstrates an important qualitative change in the determinants of educational stratification. The growing importance of mothers' education can plausibly result from the strengthening meritocratic achievement of women in education and the associated increase of women in defining the social position of the family. Incorporating the education of both parents in future analyses of intergenerational reproduction of education will probably be increasingly salient.

Young people not participating in education, employment or training (NEET) are a key policy concern in Europe. In this study, we bring forward the idea of hope as a form of life course agency to examine whether hopeful thinking plays a protective role against the risk of being NEET in the context of the British welfare state. Hope is conceptualised as multidimensional: being a temporally embedded, agentic mentality comprised of one's sense of adaptive decision-making in the present and pathways-thinking towards the future. Longitudinal estimations based on the latest Understanding Society microdata (2009-19) indicate a direct association between higher-hope modes, on average, and a lower likelihood of being NEET. Further, interaction models assess whether hopeful agency is moderated by the experience of parental worklessness. Findings indicate that hopeful agency is shown to be important in the face of NEET risks borne of family background. For the UK, building and ensuring that young people maintain an adaptive, agentic mentality towards their future in education or employment over the long term, may prove one cost-effective policy approach.

Longitudinal surveys traditionally conducted by interviewers are facing increasing pressures to explore alternatives such as sequential mixed-mode designs, which start with a cheaper self-administered mode (online) then follow up using more expensive methods such as telephone or face-to-face interviewing. Using a designed experiment conducted as part of the 2018 wave of the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) in the US, we compare a sequential mixed-mode design (web then telephone) with the standard telephone-only protocol. Using an intent-to-treat analysis, we focus on response quality and response distributions for several domains key to HRS: physical and psychological health, financial status, expectations and family composition. Respondents assigned to the sequential mixed-mode (web) had slightly higher missing data rates and more focal responses than those assigned to telephone-only. However, we find no evidence of differential quality in verifying and updating roster information. We find slightly lower rates of asset ownership reported by those assigned to the web mode. Conditional on ownership, we find no detectable mode effects on the value of assets. We find more negative (pessimistic) expectations for those assigned to the web mode. We find little evidence of poorer health reported by those assigned to the web mode. We find that effects of mode assignment on measurement are present, but for most indicators the effects are small. Finding ways to remediate the differences in item-missing data and focal values should help reduce mode effects in mixed-mode surveys or those transitioning from interviewer- to self-administration.

Understanding of how socio-economic disadvantage experienced over the life course relates to mental health outcomes in young adulthood has been limited by a lack of long-term, prospective studies. Here we address this limitation by drawing on data from a large Australian population cohort study that has followed the development of more than 2,000 Australians (and their families) from infancy to young adulthood since 1983. Associations were examined between prospective assessments of socio-economic position (SEP) from 4-8 months to 27-28 years and mental health problems (depression, anxiety, stress) and competence (civic engagement, emotional maturity, secure intimate relationship) at 27-28 years. The odds of being socio-economically disadvantaged in young adulthood were elevated eight- to tenfold in those who had experienced disadvantage in the family of origin, compared with those who had not (OR 8.1, 95% CI 4.5-14.5 to 10.1, 95% CI 5.2-19.5). Only concurrent SEP was associated with young adult mental health problems, and this effect was limited to anxiety symptoms (OR 2.0, 95% CI 1.1-3.9). In contrast, SEP had more pervasive impacts on young adult competence, particularly in the civic domain where effects were evident even from early infancy (OR 0.46, 95% CI 0.26-0.81). Findings suggest that one potentially important mechanism through which disadvantage compromises mental health is through limiting the development and consolidation of key psychosocial competencies needed for health and well-being in adulthood.