Longitudinal and Life Course Studies (E-Journal)
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Middle-income families in the economic downturn: challenges and management strategies over time
Get PDFThe “Great Recession” has hurt many families across the United States, yet most research has examined its impact on those already considered poor or working poor. However, this recession has affected middle-income families, whose experiences with economic challenge have seldom been looked at in any detail. Such families have been recently called “the new poor,” “the missing middle,” and “families in the middle.” One in seven American children under age 18 (10.5 million) has an unemployed parent as a result of this recession, and because economic mobility for children in the U.S. is affected by their parents’ earning capacities, their mobility potential may be mediated by parents’ strategies for children’s educational futures. The research presented here, which is informed by Weberian stratification theory and capital theories, is based on a longitudinal subset of a larger two-country, multicity, mixed-methods study that used surveys and qualitative semi-structured interviews to explore how middle-income families contend with economic downturn and how their adolescent children’s educational futures might be influenced. Our findings suggest that most families maintain their children’s developmental and educational status quo, but their strategies to do so constrict the potential for educational attainment. As such, the American approach to off-loading much of the cost of higher education to middle-income families who are economically stressed is not viable if we hope to maximize the number of children who will receive mobility-enhancing postsecondary education
Book Review Symposium: A Companion to Life Course Studies: the social and historical context of the British birth cohort studies. Michael Wadsworth and John Bynner
Get PDFThe German National Educational Panel Study: a wealth of potential for research in school-to-work transitions
Get PDFAdvanced societies in general, and Germany in particular, are faced with many unanswered questions regarding their vocational education and training (VET) systems in terms of access, outcomes, and individual skill formation. Is VET still capable of providing the skills necessary for a successful transition into the labour market? How can low-achieving youth enter and finish vocational training? How do cognitive and non-cognitive competencies develop in the course of VET? At the moment, however, we do not have sufficient longitudinal data to give profound answers to these and other questions. The German National Educational Panel Study (NEPS), launched in 2008 and funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research, will provide unique longitudinal data on life histories in combination with measures on competence development over the life course. Within NEPS, the so-called Stage 6, ‘Vocational Education and Training and Transitions into the Labour Market’, is devoted to collecting and providing longitudinal data on the transitions of young people from secondary schools into the labour market. In this paper, we shall describe the main features of the survey design of Stage 6 and discuss the research potential offered by this new type of data
Cross-cohort changes in gender pay differences in Britain from 1972 to 2004: accounting for selection into employment using wage imputation
No full textThis paper examines trends in the labour market position of British women and men from 1972 to 2004, using micro data from three British Birth Cohort Studies, of 1946, 1958 and 1970. Women’s rates of employment and hourly pay have been lower than men’s over this period, but generally increasing. Because employment decisions are influenced by the level of pay on offer, changes in women’s relative pay in the working population may not be representative of changes in their labour market position. We accounted for selection into employment by imputing missing hourly wages for non-employees using observed wages of employees of the same sex and age with similar work and family histories, matched on their propensity score. At each survey, women’s median hourly pay was lower than men’s. Although relative pay increased across the cohorts, it decreased with age within each cohort. Accounting for selection into employment gave a lower estimate of young women’s potential pay relative to men’s in the two earlier cohorts, flattening the within-cohort profile for the earliest cohort. This evidence supports the view that the improvement in young women’s labour market position since the 1970s has been substantial, and is underestimated in pay trends for the working population
Incidence of cardiovascular risk factors by education level 2000-2005: the Australian diabetes, obesity, and lifestyle (AusDiab) cohort study
Get PDFLower socioeconomic status (SES) is associated with a higher prevalence of major risk factors for cardiovascular disease (CVD). However, few longitudinal studies have examined the association between SES and CVD risk factors over time. We aimed to determine whether SES, using education as a proxy, is associated with the onset of CVD risk factors over 5 years in an Australian adult cohort study. Participants in the Australian Diabetes, Obesity and Lifestyle study (AusDiab) study aged 25 years and over who attended both baseline and 5-year follow-up examinations (n=5 967) were categorised according to educational attainment. Cardiovascular risk factor data at both time points were ascertained through questionnaire and physical measurement. Women with lower education had a greater risk of progressing from normal weight to overweight or obesity than those with higher education (age-adjusted OR 1.57, 95% CI 1.06-2.31). Both men and women with lower education were more likely to develop diabetes (age-adjusted OR from higher education 1.75, 95% CI 1.14-2.71 and 3.01, 95% CI 1.26-7.20, respectively). A lower level of education was associated with a greater number of risk factors accumulated over time in women (OR of progressing from having two or less risk factors at baseline to three or more at follow up, 2.04, 95% 1.32-3.14). In this Australian population-based study, lower educational attainment was associated with an increased risk of developing both individual and total CVD risk factors over a 5-year period. These findings suggest that SES inequalities in CVD will persist into the future
BMI over the lifecourse and hearing ability at age 45 years: a population based study
Get PDFPrevious research on anthropometric factors and adult hearing loss has found relationships, in separate studies, to birthweight and contemporary BMI. However no study has examined data on BMI over the lifecourse. This paper uses data from the 1958 British Birth Cohort to examine relationships between BMI (both in childhood and adulthood), changes in BMI between adjacent age waves, and hearing thresholds at 1 kHz and 4 kHz obtained by audiometric examination at age 45 yrs. Body Mass Index (BMI) in adulthood, but not in childhood, was associated with increased hearing threshold levels at both 1 kHz and 4 kHz at age 45yrs. Two further models examine the effect of changes in BMI between successive waves and adult hearing thresholds, firstly adjusting for childhood hearing loss and a range of further childhood factors (including birthweight, family history of hearing loss, mother’s weight, childhood social class) and secondly adjusting in addition for noise, current social class, current systolic blood pressure and diabetes, current smoking and drinking. In the first model, increases in BMI at age intervals throughout the lifecourse, over both childhood and adulthood, were independently associated with increased hearing threshold levels at both frequencies in mid-life, largest relationships being shown at both frequencies to increasing BMI in adolescence and in early adulthood. These relationships generally persisted in the second model, though were reduced more at earlier ages (pre 23 yrs). Noise at work attenuates the relationship between BMI change and mid life hearing threshold, more so at 4 kHz than at 1 kHz and for BMI change at older ages
Limiting long-term illness and subjective well-being in families
Get PDFThe hedonic definition of subjective well-being (SWB) includes subjective perceptions of moods and cognitive judgements of life satisfaction. Little is known about levels of well-being within families when other family members have a chronic illness. This paper explores these associations. Data come from year 1 wave 1 of Understanding Society, a new longitudinal UK-representative household panel survey. SWB of adults (³ 16 years) was measured using the GHQ-12, the Short Warwick-Edinburgh Mental Well-being Scale and a life satisfaction question. The Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire measured well-being in youth (10 to 15 years). Self-reported long-term limiting illness (LLTI) was used to indicate chronic illness. Various models incorporating latent variable and multi-level frameworks were used to explore associations between illness and SWB between partners, between older parents and adult children and between young child and parents. LLTI in one partner was negatively associated with own and their partner’s well-being. There was a significant association between a parent’s LLTI and SDQ total difficulties score for youth. These associations were accounted for in part by caring/being cared for and the physical and mental functioning of the family member with a LLTI. Adult children and their older parents did not show any association between LLTI and SWB. The findings from this study indicate that the limiting illness of one family member has differential associations with the well-being of other family members
The role of attitudes and behaviours in explaining socio-economic differences in attainment at age 16
Get PDFIt is well known that children growing up in poor families leave school with considerably lower qualifications than children from better off backgrounds. Using a simple decomposition analysis, we show that around two thirds of the socio-economic gap in attainment at age 16 can be accounted for by long-run family background characteristics and prior ability, suggesting that circumstances and investments made considerably earlier in the child's life explain the majority of the gap in test scores between young people from rich and poor families. However, we also find that differences in the attitudes and behaviours of young people and their parents during the teenage years play a key role in explaining the rich-poor gap in GCSE attainment: together, they explain a further quarter of the gap at age 16, and the majority of the small increase in this gap between ages 11 and 16. On this basis, our results suggest that while the most effective policies in terms of raising the attainment of young people from poor families are likely to be those enacted before children reach secondary school, policies that aim to reduce differences in attitudes and behaviours between the poorest children and those from better-off backgrounds during the teenage years may also make a significant contribution towards lowering the gap in achievement between young people from the richest and poorest families at age 16
Children’s educational attainment and the aspirations, attitudes and behaviours of parents and children through childhood
Get PDFOverview paper for the Special Issue of LLC