Advances in Life Course Research最新文献

Unemployment affects not only the subjective well-being of the individual, but also that of the partner. Based on the life course perspective and the spillover-crossover-model, we examine the mediating role of relationship functioning for such crossover effects of partner’s unemployment on subjective well-being. We also test whether gender differences in the mechanism of relationship functioning can explain the larger overall crossover effects on women compared to men. We use data from the German Family Panel pairfam (2008/09–2018/19), which provide more direct and comprehensive measures of relationship functioning than previous research, and allow us to examine couples’ communication and interactions, their conflict styles and behaviors, relationship satisfaction, and perceived relationship instability as mediators. To analyze the impact of the partner’s transition to unemployment on subjective well-being, we use fixed effects panel regression models and the product method of mediation analysis to estimate the indirect effects of relationship functioning. The results show that a partner’s transition to unemployment has a negative impact on one’s own well-being. The effects are more pronounced for women than men which can be partly explained by gender-specific effects of the partner’s unemployment on various aspects of relationship functioning, rather than by differential effects of the latter on one’s own well-being.

Leaving the parental home is an important life event that has received significant attention in the literature. Research on this topic relies heavily on panel data; however, panel data faces the issue of serious non-ignorable panel attrition associated with leaving the parental home. This paper addresses this issue using the UK Household Longitudinal Study (UKHLS) as a case study. It introduces an adjustment procedure that combines panel gap imputation via the next observation carried backward and inverse probability weighting based on the retrieved information about leaving the parental home. The results show that this adjustment method yields more precise model estimates for leaving the parental home, and after the adjustment, the positive marginal effects of age and living with non-biological parents, as well as the negative marginal effects of Asian ethnicity and regional house prices, become more pronounced. This adjustment method has the potential to be applied to address non-ignorable panel attrition associated with other events in different panel data.

The aim of this paper is to explore how divorce is linked to pathways to retirement in West Germany and to understand whether and how patterns are gendered. Using German pension insurance data, I employ sequence and cluster analysis to map and group pathways to retirement of women and men who retired in 2018. Pathways to retirement are defined based on monthly pension insurance histories from age 50 to 65. I find nine distinct pathways to retirement, ranging from unemployment to stable low to high income pathways and to an early retirement pathway through the reduced-earnings-capacity pension, the latter representing 9.3% of the sample. Based on multinomial logistic regression models, I analyse how marital status, distinguishing between divorced and (re)married, was related to different pathways to retirement. The results show that divorced people were more likely than married people to retire through indirect and unstable pathways to retirement characterised by early exit from the labour market and receipt of reduced-earnings-capacity pensions and/or unemployment benefits. Whereas the relationship between divorce and pathways to retirement seemed to be overall unfavourable for men, the results for women are more ambiguous. Divorced women were also more likely to retire through a stable high-income pathway than married women. Nevertheless, the results suggest that divorce is associated with an early retirement pathway through the reduced-earnings-capacity pension for both women and men.

In 2020, COVID-19-related governmental restrictions forced individuals to radically change their habits, possibly impacting on their living arrangements. Whether COVID-19 affected young adults’ propensity to leave the parental home is still unknown; Southern Europe is of particular interest, as youth experience the “latest-late” transition to adulthood, face uncertainty in the labor market, and receive low welfare support. Using EU-SILC longitudinal data from Greece, Spain, Italy, and Portugal, this study examines how home-leaving rates evolved in the short-term and explores the relationship between governmental restrictions, economic characteristics of households and young adults, and leaving home behaviors. Descriptive analyses reveal that the share of young adults leaving the parental home in Southern Europe between 2019 and 2020 slightly increased compared to previous years. Discrete-time event history models show that the propensity to leave the parental home increases with the stringency of policy measures. Young adults with the highest likelihood to leave home are employed individuals whose households are in the lowest income quintile as well as students from the highest income quintile, suggesting that, in these countries, residential independence is associated with either the acquisition of economic resources in the labor market or the availability of family resources. We interpret this result in favor of an “independence effect” exerted by COVID-19-related restrictions on young adults; future research might establish whether this trend is temporary or persistent over time.

Research suggests that children of low-educated parents face greater health burdens during the passage from adolescence to young adulthood, as they are more likely to become low-educated themselves, establish behavioural and psychosocial disadvantages, or being exposed to unhealthy working conditions. However, studies examining the development and drivers of health inequalities during this particular life stage are limited in number and have produced varied results. This study investigates trajectories of self-rated health and overweight from 14 to 25 years of age, stratified by parental education, and explores the role of potential mediators (educational achievement, health behaviours, psychosocial factors, working conditions). We rely on prospective cohort data from the National Educational Panel Study (NEPS), a representative sample of 14,981 German ninth graders interviewed yearly from 2011 to 2021 (n = 90,096 person-years). First, we estimated random-effects growth curves for self-rated health and overweight over participants’ age and calculated the average marginal effect of high versus low parental education. Second, a series of simulation-based mediation analyses were performed to test how much of health inequalities were explained by children’s educational attainment (years of school education, years in university), health behaviours (smoking, alcohol, physical inactivity), psychosocial factors (number of grade repetitions, years in unemployment, chronic stress, self-esteem) and working conditions (physical and psychosocial job demands). We accounted for potential confounding by controlling for age, sex, migration background, residential area, household composition, and interview mode. Results show that higher parental education was related to higher self-rated health and lower probabilities of being overweight. Interaction between parental education and age indicated that, after some equalisation in late adolescence, health inequalities increased in young adulthood. Furthermore, educational attainment, health behaviours, psychosocial factors, and early-career working conditions played a significant role in mediating health inequalities. Of the variables examined, the level of school education and years spent in university were particular strong mediating factors. School education accounted for around one-third of the inequalities in self-rated health and one-fifth of the differences in overweight among individuals. Results support the idea that the transition to adulthood is a sensitive period in life and that early socio-economic adversity increases the likelihood to accumulate health disadvantages in multiple dimensions. In Germany, a country with comparatively low educational mobility, intergenerational continuities in class location seem to play a key role in the explanation of health inequalities in youth.

Social network research is well-equipped to help life course scholars produce a deeper and more nuanced approach to the principle of “linked lives,” one of the cornerstones of the field. In this issue on Networked Lives, nine original articles and two commentaries generate new theories, empirical findings and methodological applications at the intersection of the fields of social networks and life course research. In this introduction, we reflect on these advances, highlighting key findings and challenges that await scholars in building more robust synergy between the two fields. Social networks emerge as key structural forces in life courses, yet there is much to learn about the mechanisms through which their effects on people’s lives come about. There is a need to study further how networks evolve through the rhythm of life events, and to analyze broader and more complex networks that capture the roles and influences of relations beyond intimate or family ties. These papers demonstrate that there is much to be gained in probing how individuals are linked to and unlinked from others over time, and in carrying conceptual and methodological advances across social network and life course studies.

This study explores the development of gender ideologies across adolescence and the transition to adulthood in Germany and investigates the relevance of first romantic relationship experiences in shaping gender beliefs. Integrating the life course perspective with the theoretical framework of gender as a social structure and psychological theories, we extend the literature by following adolescents from age 15 to about age 20 across the transition to adulthood and by differentiating between young women and men from different immigrant and non-immigrant backgrounds, who may be affected differently by gender-related expectations. Using the representative and ethnically diverse German sample of the Children of Immigrants Longitudinal Survey in Four European Countries, we conducted fixed-effects regression analyses (n = 1474). First, our findings show that young people become increasingly egalitarian during adolescence, irrespective of gender and immigrant origin. Second, for young women, romantic relationship experiences of moderate and longer durations are significantly associated with slower increases in egalitarianism. For most young men, romantic relationship experiences do not affect their gender ideologies. One exception is the group of Turkish-origin men, who change their gender ideologies less towards egalitarianism with increasing relationship durations than other groups of young men. The findings suggest that, especially for young women, early romantic relationships may be crucial in shaping their gender beliefs, which subsequently predict important educational, occupational, and family choices.