Advances in Life Course Research最新文献

Several theories of the life course highlight the importance of social connections and ties for coping with transitions that occur at different ages. Individuals rely on family, friends, and colleagues to adapt to these transitions which may in turn change the composition of their networks. Yet, little is known about the association between life cycle transitions and changes in network characteristics. We used fixed effects regression models with three waves of egocentric network data from the UC Berkeley Social Network Study (UCNets) to examine how career- and family-related life cycle transitions during two key life stages—young adulthood and the transition from middle to old age—are associated with network turnover, the proportion of the network comprised of kin, and confidence in receiving support from personal networks. Younger adults experienced churn following a birth and marriage or partnership, while no life transition was associated with changes in proportion kin, and only with the birth of a child did confidence decline. Among older adults, no transition was associated with any measured event, suggesting that older adults maintain more stable relationships compared to young adults and can weather life events without significant disruptions to their networks.

Empirical evidence shows that lack of resources during infancy and the process of accumulating disadvantages throughout childhood have important consequences for cognitive and socio-emotional development. This paper examines socioeconomic gradients across language and socio-emotional measures. Using longitudinal data from 7-year, three-wave panel data, we study the patterns of socioeconomic status and child development in Chile and estimate how much of the wealth gap can be explained by different mediators like maternal educational and skills, child attendance of preschool and school, possession of books, or domestic violence indicators. We show that there are strong associations between household wealth and child development, and that, as the child grows, the gap between the most extreme quintiles of the distribution, both in cognitive and socio-emotional skills, persists but decreases in magnitude. Taking advantage of the longitudinal nature of the data, we calculate a permanent skill for each child and each skill dimension in this 7-year period. The analysis for the permanent component shows that wealth gaps are important to determine language, but not socio-emotional skills, and that the gap is larger for girls than for boys in the early childhood period. While mediators account for some of the associations, there is still a large socioeconomic gap that persists in receptive language among children. The most important factors that mediate the wealth gaps are inherited from maternal characteristics. By understanding the dynamism of social and cognitive vulnerability experienced during childhood and employing longitudinal data and methods, this study contributes to and extends the existing literature on socioeconomic gaps and child development in the Latin American context.

Individuals tend to be most mobile when they are between 20 and 40 years of age. This pattern is relatively stable across regions and over time. For geographical mobility, less is known about their transitions between different types of housing and tenure forms. In Sweden, households may select between, principally, three different types of tenure forms, each often coupled with a specific housing type. Households may rent from either public companies (municipality owned) or private landlords in multifamily dwellings, households may own their single-family house privately, or they can cooperatively own a multifamily house as a tenant-owner in an apartment. Yet we lack knowledge of which tenure trajectories individuals tend to follow during their most mobile years, and we also lack knowledge about which factors determine tenure trajectories. Our sample consist of individuals who in 1995 were aged 18–25 and who left their parental house between 1994 and 1995. This study tracks their tenure trajectories for 21 consecutive years starting in 1995 until 2015. The cohorts in our sample were the first who encountered the conditions on the deregulated housing market that are still in place in Sweden today. We followed these cohorts until they were between 39 and 46 years old and used sequence analysis to classify tenure trajectories. One result that stands out is the outstanding and increasing emphasis on home ownership in our sample, quite unlike the traditional picture of the Swedish housing market. Additionally, we found that resources in a broad sense and spatial context have a great impact on the type of trajectory individuals follow.

This study investigates partnership transitions of young adults born between 1974 and 1990 in England and Wales. These cohorts were affected by the expansion of higher education, increasing gender equality, and ideational changes, but faced increased economic precarity caused by the economic and housing crisis. Given these changes, it is likely that the partnership experiences of young adults including marriage, cohabitation, separation, and repartnering have also undergone considerable changes. We apply competing risks event history analysis to combined data from the British Household Panel Survey and the UK Household Longitudinal Study to determine how birth cohort, gender, socio-economic background, and educational attainment influence partnership changes. We study the transition into and out of first cohabitation and marriage and repartnering between age 16 and 27. Cohabitation has become a universal form of first union among young adults born in the late 1970s and 1980s regardless of their socio-economic background or educational level, but their first unions do not last long. While cohabiters are equally likely to marry or separate in the oldest cohort (1974–1979), cohabiting unions are very likely to end in separation among the two youngest cohorts (1980–1984 and 1985–1990). Consequently, repartnering has become common; those in the youngest cohort repartner rather quickly suggesting that an increasing number of individuals experience multiple partnerships. Highly educated young adults have higher rates of entry into first cohabitation than their lower educated counterparts across all cohorts. However, we do not find differences in cohabitation outcomes by socio-economic background and educational level indicating that the main changes have taken place across birth cohorts. The results also suggest that there is a convergence in partnership experiences among young men and women. The increased prevalence of sliding into and out of cohabitation could indicate significant changes in the meaning young people attach to first partnerships.

Although several studies have discovered positive relationships between religion and various aspects of mental health, less is known about longitudinal associations between religiosity and psychological well-being over the life course. We examined how religious latent classes during the transition to adulthood are associated with trajectories of psychological well-being over 45 years. We selected 798 young-adults baby-boomers from the 1971 wave of the Longitudinal Study of Generation (mean age: 19 years) and tracked their psychological well-being over nine waves up to the 2016 wave (mean age: 64 years). Latent class analysis focused on four religiosity domains (religious service attendance, religious intensity, civic value of religion, literal beliefs) identified four distinct latent religious classes: strongly religious, weakly religious, liberally religious, and privately religious. Results of latent growth curve modeling showed that strongly religious baby-boomers during the transition to adulthood generally reported better psychological well-being than weakly religious baby-boomers at the same stage in life. In addition, psychological well-being in strongly, liberally, and privately religious baby-boomers followed a consistently upward trend across the life course, whereas among weakly religious baby-boomers psychological well-being followed an inverted u-curve (increased until mid-40s and decreased thereafter). Findings suggest that earlier religiosity may serve as a significant predictor affecting psychological well-being throughout the adult life course.

Whilst research has demonstrated an intergenerational transmission of partnership dissolution, there is limited evidence as to the early life course pathways through which these associations operate, and whether these differ by gender. Many studies have not considered prospective data from early childhood, thus potentially neglecting the importance of the early childhood period in explaining this intergenerational transmission. Given that serial partnering has become increasingly commonplace it is important research considers those who experience multiple partnership dissolution. This paper examines, using data from the 1970 British Birth Cohort Study, the early life mediators underpinning the association between parental separation and the number of offspring partnership dissolutions. Among both men and women there is a significant unadjusted relationship between parental separation and the experience of multiple partnership dissolutions in adulthood. These associations were reduced once parental confounders and childhood mediators are included. Formal mediation analyses demonstrated that early life mediators accounted for more of the association in men than women. Mediators included childhood living standards, and for men child cognition and child behaviour, and for women maternal mental wellbeing. Parental separation and many early life mediators were related to the likelihood of multiple partnership dissolutions through age at first partnership.

Through Nan Lin's social resource theory, network studies have demonstrated the importance of personal contacts for status attainment. Achieving better occupations, wages, or social prestige depends not only on individual skills and personal resources, such as social class or human capital. Personal networks are also important structural factors because they provide access to social resources that are critical to careers, such as information and social support. Today, new research angles emerge from analyses of multilevel networks (AMN) on additional structural factors that are important for status attainment: the advantages of belonging to powerful and prestigious organizations and accessing through them complementary forms of social capital. From a series of AMN studies on one élite group of researchers, the importance of these structural aspects for professional careers emerge through concepts such as 'dual positioning' and ‘dual alters’, offering hypotheses that complement Nan Lin's theory in each of its postulates. Taking these hypotheses into account, the article formulates a model for the study of status attainment consisting of four arguments: (1) individuals' initial positions, (2) access to social capital, and the impact of its (3) mobilization on (4) socioeconomic returns. The article discusses the analytical strategies that emerge from this model, opening up new prospects for investigating the role played by social networks in status attainment.

Analysts who research the effect of education on behaviour related to the transition to adulthood are often limited by information available from censuses and surveys, which generally collect only the highest level of education attained at the time of the interview. Unfortunately, this leads to extreme simplification of people's educational paths and does not allow researchers to know exactly when they completed their studies, whether they did so satisfactorily, or whether they had periods of interruption in their educational cycle. In this paper we therefore investigate the problems deriving from having incomplete educational information when analysing events of transition to adulthood such as leaving the parental home, forming a first union, and having a first child. These needs for more detailed information explain why some surveys have questionnaires that would allow for reconstruction of the complete educational history, but this information is difficult to collect and to use. In order to overcome these difficulties of either the complexity or excessive simplicity of questionnaires on education, we propose a new set of questions. These would permit researchers to provide, with the minimum number of questions, the maximum possible useful information on the level and duration of studies, while also taking into account the most important and relevant interruptions. For the empirical analysis we have used the Fertility and Family Surveys (FFS) for 12 European countries with sufficient data to reconstruct the complete educational cycle.

This article reviews ever published quantitative evidence on in-work poverty and family demographic processes in OECD and EU-28 countries. Despite the increasing attention to in-work poverty in Europe and beyond, a comprehensive and critical review on how family demographic processes shape in-work poverty risks is still missing. In this systematic review, we first provide a quantitative review of results from analyses that estimated the association between in-work poverty and parental home leaving, union formation, marriage, parenthood, and dissolution of non-marital and marital unions. This allows us to formulate tentative conclusions about whether and in which direction family demographic processes are associated with in-work poverty. Second, we discuss in detail conceptual and methodological advances in in-work poverty research, such as longitudinal analytical designs or attempts to make in-work poverty research more sensitive to policy context, gender, and the life course. Our review highlights theoretical and methodological challenges for future studies linking in-work poverty and family demography.

Background

Work and family lives interact in complex ways across individuals’ life courses. In the past decade, many studies constructed work-family trajectories, some also examined the relation with health. The aims of this systematic review were to summarise the evidence from studies constructing work-family trajectories, and to synthesise the evidence on the association between work-family trajectories and health.

Methods

We searched MEDLINE, EMBASE, PsycINFO, SocINDEX and Web of Science databases. Key search terms related to work, family and trajectories. Studies that built combined work-family trajectories or examined the relationship between work and family trajectories were included. Risk of bias was assessed independently by two authors. The identified work-family trajectories were summarised and presented for men and women, age cohorts and contexts. The evidence on the association with health as antecedent or consequence was synthesised.

Results

Forty-eight studies, based on 29 unique data sources, were included. Thirty-two studies (67%) were published in 2015 or later, and sequence analysis was the primary analytic technique used to construct the trajectories (n = 43, 90%). Trajectories of women were found to be more diverse and complex in comparison with men. Work-family trajectories differed by age cohorts and contexts. Twenty-three studies (48%) examined the association between work-family trajectories and health and most of these studies found significant associations. The results indicate that work-family trajectories characterised by an early transition to parenthood, single parenthood, and weak ties to employment are associated with worse health outcomes.

Conclusions

Work-family trajectories differed greatly between men and women, but differences seemed to decrease in the youngest cohorts. Given the current changes in labour markets and family formation processes, it is important to investigate the work and family lives of younger cohorts. Work-family trajectories were associated with health at different life stages. Future research should examine longitudinal associations of work-family trajectories with health and focus on elucidating why and under which circumstances some trajectories are associated with better or worse health compared with other trajectories.