Advances in Life Course Research最新文献

Intra-family crossover effects triggered by job losses have received growing attention across scientific disciplines, but existing research has reached discrepant conclusions concerning if, and if so how, parental job losses affect child mental health. Drawing on sociological models of stress and life course epidemiology, we ask if parental job losses have long-term effects on child mental health, and if these effects are conditional on the timing of, or the cumulative exposure to, job losses. We use intergenerationally linked Swedish register data combined with entropy balance and structural nested mean models for the analyses. The data allow us to track 400,000 children over 14 years and thereby test different life-course models of cross-over effects. We identify involuntary job losses using information on workplace closures, thus reducing the risk of confounding. Results show that paternal but not maternal job loss significantly increases the risk of psychotropic drug use among children, that the average effects are modest in size (less than 4% in relative terms), that they may persist for up to five years, and that they are driven by children aged 6–10 years. Moreover, cumulative exposure to multiple job losses are more harmful than zero or one job loss.

Background

An unintended spontaneous termination of a pregnancy can be a traumatic experience affecting the subsequent life course, but has received little attention in socio-demographic studies on fertility intentions or behavior. The theoretical background of our study draws on considerations from life course research, the Theory of Planned Behavior and the Traits-Desires-Intentions-Behavior framework.

Objective

This study investigates whether the experience of pregnancy loss changes the fertility desires and intentions of women in their subsequent life course.

Methods

We use 11 waves of the Panel Analysis of Intimate Relationships and Family Dynamics (pairfam) with 5197 women in total, of which 281 women (5.4%) reported a miscarriage. Data have been collected annually in Germany since 2008. We investigate four dependent variables capturing different indicators of the ideational dimension of fertility: Personal ideal number of children, realistic number of (additional) children, intention to have a(nother) child in the next two years and importance of having a(nother) child. We study the intrapersonal changes in these items among women after a pregnancy loss, applying linear fixed effect regression models. Controls include parity, age, partnership status, pregnancy status and the interaction of pregnancy loss with whether the woman already had children before the pregnancy loss.

Results

We found that the importance of having a(nother) child and the intention to have a(nother) child in the next two years increase after a pregnancy loss. These patterns can only partially be explained by control variables. By contrast, an effect on the ideal number of children as well as the realistic number of children could not be found. The patterns varied, however, across age and stage in the life course, most importantly between mothers and childless women.

Conclusions

Our results demonstrate that the effect of pregnancy loss on the subsequent life course varies across the indicators used and by duration after the pregnancy loss. Overall, they suggest that specifically the younger women in our sample might perceive pregnancy loss as a temporary crisis in their transition to motherhood, or to having another child, and as an impetus to reinforce their fertility goals, while for older respondents this might mark the end of their fertility career. Against the backdrop of rising ages at childbirth, future research on fertility and reproductive health care should pay more attention to reproductive complications and how affected women can be supported in coping with them.

Objectives

Emerging evidence supports the protective effects of higher childhood socioeconomic status (cSES) on cognition over the life course. However, less understood is if higher cSES confers benefits equally across intersecting social positions. Guided by a situational intersectionality perspective and the theory of Minority Diminished Returns (MDR), this study examined the extent to which associations between cSES and cognition in young adulthood are jointly moderated by racialized identity and region of childhood residence.

Methods

Using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health), we used multilevel modeling to test associations between cSES and delayed recall and working memory 14 years later when participants were ages 25–34. Further, we examined the influence of racialized identity and region of childhood residence on these associations.

Results

Higher cSES was associated with higher delayed recall and working memory scores across social positions. However, the strength of the association between higher cSES and working memory differed across racialized subgroups and region of childhood residence. We found a statistically significant three-way interaction between cSES, race and region of childhood residence. Of particular important, a small yet statistically robust association was found in all groups, but was especially strong among White Southerners and especially weak among Black participants from the South.

Conclusions

This study contributes to a growing body of research indicating that the protective effects of higher cSES on cognition are not universal across subgroups of intersecting social positions, consistent with the theory of MDR. These findings provide evidence for the importance of considering the role of systemic racism across geographic contexts as part of initiatives to promote equity in life course cognitive aging and brain health.

Recent research has documented that the effect of parental separation on children’s educational outcomes depends on socioeconomic background. Yet, parental separation could lead to a stable single-parent family or to a further transition to a stepfamily. Little is known about how the effect of family structure transitions on educational outcomes depends on the education of parents and stepparents, and there has been limited empirical research into the mechanisms that explain heterogeneity in the effects of family transitions. Using longitudinal data from the German Socio-Economic Panel and models with entropy balancing and sibling fixed effects, I explore the heterogeneous effects of family transitions during early and middle childhood on academic secondary school track attendance, grades and aspirations. I find that family transitions only reduce the academic school track attendance among children of less educated parents living in stepfamilies or with a single mother after parental separation, and among children of highly educated fathers living in single-mother families. The mechanisms that partly explain these effects relate to reduced income and exposure to poverty after parental separation. The findings underscore the importance of considering the stepparent's educational level, indicating that the adverse consequences of parental separation on educational outcomes are mitigated when a highly educated stepfather becomes part of the family. Overall, these findings align more closely with the resource perspective than the family stability perspective.

Objective

This study examines whether parental emotional distress during the first pandemic-related school shutdown in 2020 in Germany affected the development of primary school students’ mathematical skills and investigates changes in parents’ working conditions as triggers of cascading stress processes.

Background

The Family Stress Model (FSM) explains the mechanisms that mediate between families’ structural conditions and children's developmental outcomes. Foundational works for this approach focus on historic events that instigate rapid structural changes which, in turn, undermine families' economic situation. The economic losses trigger stress processes. Research on the COVID-19 pandemic reports heightened levels of parental stress and negative impacts on children's cognitive and socioemotional development. This study examines the role of parental emotional distress during the COVID-19 shutdown on children's cognitive development. Expanding on the classical FSM, we hypothesize that changes in parents' working situation, rather than economic changes, may have triggered family stress processes during the shutdown, as federal support largely cushioned economic cutbacks in Germany.

Method

For the German National Educational Panel Study (NEPS), interviews were conducted with parents, and primary school students in Starting Cohort 1 were tested after the first shutdown in 2020. The database provides rich information from survey waves prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, allowing a longitudinal analysis of a sample of 1512 primary school students with ordinary least squares regression.

Results

Parents’ emotional distress during the pandemic had a robust negative effect on students’ mathematical skills, even when controlling for prior parenting stress. Changes in parents’ working conditions also had an effect on children’s test scores, and the negative effect of working from home on the test scores was mediated by parents’ emotional distress.

Conclusion

The COVID-19 pandemic was a historic event which, at least in Germany, challenged the mental health of many parents and, in turn, impaired the skill development of primary school students. We introduce the role of changes in working conditions as triggers of such processes.

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.