Advances in Life Course Research最新文献

Thousands of Indian women and girls enter the commercial sex industry (CSI) annually based solely on membership in particular castes (e.g., Bedia, Nat). CSI-involved females bear the burden of sustaining entire family units on money earned in the sex trade; it is a life-long responsibility with negligible social status or personal indemnity. Based on the life-course developmental theory (Elder, Jr. 1994, 1998) this investigation was intended to examine trafficked women’s experiences within the commercial sex industry across time. Beyond the CSI, we were equally interested in experiences with factors that could promote well-being (i.e., social support) and normative developmental transitions including education attainment and motherhood. To that end, three questions were posed. First, to what extent do factors surrounding CSI entry and continued involvement differ through time among CSI-involved Bedia? Second, how do CSI-involved Bedia describe social network composition and perceived support through time? Finally, are differences detectable, through time, in CSI-involved Bedia women’s experiences with normative developmental transitions including education attainment and motherhood? Interview data were collected from 31 Bedia females (age range 17 – 65 years) residing in rural Madhya Pradesh, India. To examine change through time, participants were divided into cohorts based on age and time involved in the commercial sex industry. Data were then analyzed within and across cohorts with particular attention to cohort-related experiential differences. Policy implications and suggestions for continued research are presented.

Decisions about which contraceptives to use are a key component of a couple’s “fertility work,” and these decisions can be made in homogamous or heterogamous couple contexts. Relative resource theory and the strain perspective suggest that heterogamy may lead to differences in bargaining power or higher levels of discordance within couples, thereby affecting the distribution of fertility work and decisions about which contraceptives a couple will use. While heterogamy has been linked to less effective contraceptive use amongst teenagers, its role in the contraceptive behavior of married and cohabiting women has been less widely studied. This study examines the association between relationship context in terms of education, age, and race/ethnicity heterogamy and partnered women’s use of contraceptives. We used data on partnered women aged 20–45 who were trying to avoid pregnancy from the 2006–2015 National Survey of Family Growth (n = 8097). We used multinomial logistic regressions to determine whether education, age, or race/ethnicity heterogamy was associated with the use of male or female sterilization, long-acting reversible contraceptives (LARCs), other hormonal contraceptives, or other non-hormonal methods. We did not find consistent evidence that relative bargaining power due to higher education, more advanced age, or racial/ethnic privilege resulted in the use of methods requiring lower levels of fertility work. We found some evidence supporting the strain perspective. Younger women (20−34) who differed from their partners along two or more dimensions were less likely to use contraceptive methods requiring ongoing effort and coordination (i.e., LARCs, other hormonal methods, and non-hormonal methods). This association was not observed among women aged 35–45. Despite the more permanent nature of marriage/cohabitation, differences between partners in heterogamous relationships may factor into the contraceptive decision-making process, especially among younger adults at earlier stages of their relationships.

The increasing participation of women in the labor market coexists with traditional gender roles and a social division of labor that reproduces the feminization of childcare and housework. Reconciling the contradictions between work and family life has become one of the greatest challenges of the contemporary female life course. In this article, I analyze the strategies through which women in Santiago de Chile negotiate their participation in the labor market after the transition to motherhood using qualitative data produced through 28 in-depth life story interviews. The findings confirm that married women from older age cohorts and middle socioeconomic status scale down paid work by working part-time, reducing their working hours, and finding more flexible and less demanding jobs that are closer to home. However, the findings also reveal that single women from younger age cohorts and lower socioeconomic status scale up on paid work by working full-time and finding jobs that are more demanding, involve longer workdays and provide better salaries and social benefits. These findings advance knowledge on the strategies through which women from different age cohorts and family and socioeconomic status negotiate paid work after becoming mothers and highlight the importance of taking a situated and intersectional approach to account for the particular ways in which women reconcile work and family life.

Only children, here defined as individuals growing up without siblings, are a small but growing demographic subgroup. Existing research has consistently shown that, on average, only children have higher body mass index (BMI) than individuals who grow up with siblings. How this difference develops with age is unclear and existing evidence is inconclusive regarding the underlying mechanisms. We investigate BMI trajectories for only children and those with siblings up to late adolescence for four British birth cohorts and across adulthood for three cohorts. We use data on BMI from ages 2–63 years (cohort born 1946); 7–55 years (born 1958); 10–46 (born 1970) and 3–17 years (born 2000–2002). Using mixed effects regression separately for each cohort, we estimate the change in BMI by age comparing only children and those with siblings. The results show higher average BMI among only children in each cohort, yet the difference is substantively small and limited to school age and adolescence. The association between sibling status and BMI at age 10/11 is not explained by differential health behaviours (physical activity, inactivity and diet) or individual or family background characteristics in any of the cohorts. Although persistent across cohorts, and despite the underlying mechanism remaining unexplained, the substantively small magnitude of the observed difference and the convergence of the trajectories by early adulthood in all cohorts raises doubts about whether the difference in BMI between only children and siblings in the UK context should be of research or clinical concern. Future research could usefully be directed more at whether only children experience elevated rates of disease, for which high BMI is a risk factor, at different stages of the life course and across contexts.

Young adulthood is a dynamic and demographically dense stage in the life course. This poses a challenge for research on the socioeconomic consequences of parenthood timing, which most often focuses on women. We chart the dynamics of delayed parenthood and its implications for educational and labor market trajectories for young adult women and men using a novel longitudinal analysis approach, the parametric g-formula. This method allows the estimation of both population-averaged effects (among all women and men) and average treatment effects (among mothers and fathers). Based on high-quality data from Finnish registers, we find that later parenthood exacerbates the educational advantage of women in comparison to men and attenuates the income advantage of men in comparison to women across young adult ages. Gender differences in the consequences of delayed parenthood on labor market trajectories are largely not explained by changes in educational trajectories. Moreover, at the time of entering parenthood, delayed parenthood improves the incomes of fathers more than those of mothers, thereby exacerbating existing gender differences. The results provide population-level evidence on how the delay of parenthood has contributed to the strengthening of women’s educational position relative to that of men. Further, the findings on greater increases in fathers’ than mothers’ incomes at the time of entering parenthood, as followed by postponement, may help explain why progress in achieving gender equality in the division of paid and unpaid work in families has been slow.

Although the gender gap in labour force participation has narrowed considerably in many European countries, life course scholars have shown that the transition to parenthood exacerbates gender inequality in couples’ division of paid work. Hitherto, variation by migration background has received limited attention in research on the effect of parenthood on couples’ gender division of paid work. This is remarkable given that such heterogeneity is theoretically informative on differential interconnectedness of life course events, but may also inform policy makers on the life course transitions that induce migrant-native differentials in women’s labour force participation. This study adopts a life course perspective and uses longitudinal microdata from Belgian social security registers to examine variation in couples’ gender division of paid work around family formation by migration background. Taking into account couples’ migration background – by considering the origin group and migrant generation of both partners – we identify four patterns of gender dynamics around family formation in couples where at least one partner is of migrant origin. These four patterns emerge from (dis)similarities with native couples with respect to their pre-birth division of paid work on the one hand and their changes in this division around family formation on the other hand. These results highlight that combining an account of couples’ division of paid work prior to the birth of a first child with a perspective focussing on how the division of paid work changes around family formation is necessary for a thorough understanding of variation by migration background.

Adolescence and youth are periods of great changes in an individual’s life, during which experiencing first events of the transition to adulthood and, sometimes, violating social norms. Literature has identified an association of risk behaviours with timing of first sexual intercourse, but scant information is available about their relationship with the use of protection or the choice of a casual partner. This study focuses on the relation between initiation of risk behaviours (get drunk and drug use) and initiation of intercourse. Using event history analysis – also in their competing risk form - on data on Italian university students collected in 2000–2001 and in 2017, we intend to verify to what extent the initiation and the timing to risk behaviours is associated with the circumstances of first intercourse (timing, use of protection, type of partner), and if and how initiation to risk behaviours interacts differently with age at sexual debut. Our results show that in a country such as Italy, where family and sexual norms are relatively traditional, young people who got drunk, used marijuana or ecstasy at least one time in their life are more likely to experience risky sexual intercourse.

Transgender and nonbinary people’s life experiences are highly heterogenous and shaped by broader structural and cultural forces. We analyze experiences identified in lifeline interviews from 87 transgender and nonbinary adults in Atlanta, New York City, and San Francisco. We find that the type, timing, and relative importance of these experiences varied across categories. For example, experiences related to “Rejection and violence” were more often identified in childhood and in the past, whereas experiences related to “Gender-affirming medical interventions” were more common in adulthood and anticipated futures. Experiences related to “Community involvement,” “Extracurriculars,” “Gender exploration and revelation,” and “Gender-affirming medical interventions” were labeled by respondents as relatively more important compared to other experiences, whereas experiences related to “Family of origin relationships,” “Place of residence,” “Rejection and violence,” and “Sexuality” less important. These experiences were patterned according to the respondents’ gender, birth cohort, race/ethnicity, and geographic location. In analyzing these lifeline data, we advance theoretical understandings of the salience of a variety of key experiences for transgender and nonbinary people at different points in the life course. Our life course approach provides empirical analyses of intra-individual processes over time for transgender and nonbinary people and provides insight into the usefulness of a lifeline method for life course studies more generally as it draws attention to within-person assessments of the distribution and importance of experiences over a lifetime.

Caring for a friend or family member in need of care has been found to have negative consequences for wages. This study contributes to the literature by studying how three major life course factors, namely timing of first caregiving, duration of caregiving, and the number of caregiving episodes, help to explain the (hourly) wage penalty for informal caregivers (i.e., providers of health-related care to older or disabled people in the personal network). We used unique retrospective data of 1417 informal caregivers in the Netherlands that map start and end dates of up to seven caregiving episodes. Findings showed that a higher number of caregiving episodes was related to a stronger wage penalty, whereas timing of first caregiving was not associated with a wage penalty. Opposite to our expectation, we found that the wage penalty decreased the longer someone cared, potentially even resulting in a wage premium for long-time caregivers. We conclude that applying a life course perspective is relevant when examining employment consequences of informal caregiving and that caregiving possibly fosters skills that are beneficial for employment careers in the long run.

Combining work and family roles can have beneficial consequences on health but could also result in chronic stress and adverse health outcomes at older ages. This study aimed to examine combined employment, parenthood, and partnership histories of men and women during the childbearing period (ages 15-49), and to investigate the links of these work and family roles with physical functioning later in life. We used data from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) with retrospective information on employment, parenthood, and partnership histories for 18,057 men and 20,072 women (n = 38,129) living in 28 different countries belonging to six European welfare clusters. We applied multichannel sequence analysis (MCSQA) and hierarchical clustering to group work-family trajectories into 12 clusters for men and 15 clusters for women. We assessed the association between work-family life courses and grip strength by estimating multivariable linear regression models. Delayed work and family transitions, unstable employment, and the absence of combinations of work and family roles between age 15 and 49 were associated with weaker grip strength in later life for both men and women. Results differed by gender and were framed by the welfare context in which gendered work and family responsibilities unfold across individual life courses. The findings make an important contribution to the domain of gender and health in later life and stress the need to engage more with issues related to the mechanisms linking work and family trajectories to poor health in later life.