Longitudinal and Life Course Studies (E-Journal)
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Tracking the Gendered Life Courses of Care Leavers in 19th-Century Britain
Full text linkThe adult outcomes of children raised in care are a matter of much concern in Britain today. Care leavers account for a quarter of the adult prison population, a tenth of the young homeless population, and over two thirds of sex workers (Centre for Social Justice, 2015: 4). This article argues that, by contrast, the first generation of boys and girls passing through the early care system were more likely to have experienced a modest improvement in their life chances. It explores three key questions. First, what mechanisms shaped adult outcomes of care in the past? Second, did these vary by gender? Third, what might life course approaches to these issues gain from engaging both with historical- and gender-inflected analysis? The article draws on our wider analysis of the life courses and life chances of 400 adults who passed through the early youth justice and care systems as children in the northwest of England from the 1860s to the 1920s. These systems were closely interlinked. Within that, the article focuses on the experiences of a subgroup sent to a more care-oriented institution. It compares their collective outcomes with those of the wider group and within-group by gender. It offers a selection of case studies of women’s lives before and after care to highlight the value of, and challenges involved in, undertaking gender analysis in life course research of this kind
Sensitivity analysis within multiple imputation framework using delta-adjustment: Application to Longitudinal Study of Australian Children
Full text linkMultiple imputation (MI) is a powerful statistical method for handling missing data. Standard implementations of MI are valid under the unverifiable assumption of missing at random (MAR), which is often implausible in practice. The delta-adjustment method, implemented within the MI framework, can be used to perform sensitivity analyses that assess the impact of departures from the MAR assumption on the final inference. This method requires specification of unknown sensitivity parameter(s) (termed as delta(s)).We illustrate the application of the delta-adjustment method using data from the Longitudinal Study of Australian Children, where the epidemiological question is to estimate the association between exposure to maternal emotional distress at age 4–5 years and total (social, emotional, and behavioural) difficulties at age 8–9 years. We elicited the sensitivity parameters for the outcome (????????) and exposure (????????) variables from a panel of experts. The elicited quantile judgements from each expert were converted into a suitable parametric probability distribution and combined using the linear pooling method. We then applied MI under MAR followed by sensitivity analyses under missing not at random (MNAR) using the delta-adjustment method. We present results from sensitivity analyses that used different percentile values of the pooled distributions for the delta parameters for ???????? and ????????, and demonstrate that twofold increases in the magnitude of the association between maternal distress and total difficulties are only observed for large departures from MAR
Health effects of work and family transitions
Full text linkDisruptive life events, including transitions in work or family structure, affect health. Research often focuses on one transition rather than thinking of an event framework in which respondents experience multiple transitions across qualitatively distinct domains. This paper contributes original evidence on the effects of event interaction, transition timing, and multiple occurrences of events on health outcomes. I look at employment loss, employment gain, marriage, and divorce as instances of disruptive transitions or instability in the life course; I analyse these events’ effects on self-rated health and depression at ages 40 and 50. I show that employment losses and divorces have significant negative effects on health, and employment gains and marriages show smaller positive effects or null effects. Higher counts of transitions lead to stronger effects on health. Respondents who are older at event occurrence show larger negative effects, suggesting that work and family instability at early ages is not as detrimental to health as such instability at later ages. These results show that there are similarities across work and family domains in effects on health outcomes; moreover, experiencing several transitions can lead to overlaps in effects that might lessen or worsen health outcomes overall
The impact imperative
Full text linkBased on Keynote Presentation to Society for Longitudinal and Life Course Studies Conference at Stirling University, October 2017
Chronic illness and mental strain: The longitudinal role of partners with time since illness onset
No full textChronic conditions are associated with large personal, familial and social costs, and have deleterious effects on individuals’ mental health. Drawing on the stress process model, we theorise and test how the presence of a partner moderates the extent to which living with a chronic condition affects mental health, and whether any protective effects change with time since illness onset, or differ between men and women. Our empirical analyses rely on nationally representative, panel data for Australia (n?180,000 observations) and panel regression models. Being in a partnership, particularly in a marriage, is associated with better mental health amongst all individuals, but more so amongst the chronically ill. This advantage remains beyond the year of illness onset, and is of a comparable magnitude for men and women. These findings bear important implications for mental health in modern societies experiencing rapid population ageing, a rising prevalence of chronic illness, and declining marriage rates
Living Situations and Social Support in the Era of Extended Foster Care: A View from the U.S.
Full text linkSocial support is important for promoting resiliency and decreasing the occurrence and impact of negative life events as foster youth transition to adulthood. However, the types and amount of support may vary by where youth are placed. Additionally, it is not known whether state policies that extend the foster care age limit beyond age 18 are associated with greater social support. This paper examines how types and sources of social support vary by youths’ foster care placement and foster care status at age 19. Data come from the CalYOUTH Study, a representative sample of youths in California foster care where 611 participants were interviewed at ages 17 and 19. Information was gathered on youths’ perceived adequacy of three types of social support (emotional, tangible, and advice/guidance) and their sources of support (family, peers, and professionals). Overall, a third or more of the particpants reported having inadequate support in each of the three support domains, which calls for renewed efforts to ensure that foster youth have adults they can rely on as they transition to adulthood regardless of where they happen to be living. After controlling for prior social support and other characteristics, youth in foster homes with relatives had less contact with professionals than did youth in other placements. In-care youth were more likely than out-of-care youth to have adequate advice and tangible support and to identify a professional as a support. These findings provide early support for the role of extended care in linking youth to important social resources
Introduction to the special issue: Outcomes of children raised in out-of-home care
No full textThe aim of this special issue is to examine the outcomes of children who were raised for part of their childhood in out-of-home care, including in foster care and institutions. There is a growing body of literature examining the transition to adulthood for young people leaving care. While these studies generally show that youths raised in care are at risk of experiencing adverse outcomes in adulthood, the amount of literature is still small. This special issue was initiated to bring together studies on the aftercare experiences of women and men, from a variety of disciplines, covering different countries and historical periods.
Dimensions of family disruption: Coincidence, interactions, and impacts on children’s educational attainment
Full text linkHousehold composition, economic resources, and residence are not necessarily stable across childhood. Changes in parental relationship status, parental employment, and residence have been shown to affect children’s educational attainment. Less studied is the fact that these events can occur in combination: families could experience more than one of these disruptive events within the same time period (e.g. year); from a life course perspective, families could experience multiple events throughout their lives. Using linear regression models to analyse data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, a longitudinal study of U.S. individuals, I confirmed that the children of parents who experienced employment loss or gain, or partner loss or gain demonstrated lowered odds of high school completion, college attendance, and college completion. Residential moves increased the odds of high school completion but decreased chances of college completion. I then found that experiencing two disruptive events within a given two-year period led to an increased negative effect compared to experiencing only one event. These findings robustly applied to different comparison group specifications. Finally, I showed that, generally, increasing the number of disruptive events decreased the probability of attaining the educational outcomes considered
A software package for the application of probabilistic anonymisation to sensitive individual-level data: a proof of principle with an example from the ALSPAC birth cohort study
Full text linkIndividual-level data require protection from unauthorised access to safeguard confidentiality and security of sensitive information. Risks of disclosure are evaluated through privacy risk assessments and are controlled or minimised before data sharing and integration. The evolution from ‘Micro Data Laboratory’ traditions (i.e. access in controlled physical locations) to ‘Open Data’ (i.e. sharing individual-level data) drives the development of efficient anonymisation methods and protection controls. Effective anonymisation techniques should increase the uncertainty surrounding re-identification while retaining data utility, allowing informative data analysis. ‘Probabilistic anonymisation’ is one such technique, which alters the data by addition of random noise. In this paper, we describe the implementation of one probabilistic anonymisation technique into an operational software written in R and we demonstrate its applicability through application to analysis of asthma-related data from the ALSPAC cohort study. The software is designed to be used by data managers and users without the requirement of advanced statistical knowledge