1,720,988 research outputs found
The mental toll of being connected. What kind of impact is social media having on adolescent health?
No full textKey messages: Adolescence is a time when young people establish habits, certain health behaviours and lifestyles that shape later life outcomes, however, there is not a wide range of research on adolescents’ health. The number of adolescents dealing with mental illness, specifically depression, is growing. Depression at this young age can have implications on one’s future mental and physical health.
Social media use among adolescents has resulted in higher levels of unhappiness, anxiety and depression among young people.
Students should learn in school how to navigate social media, and be educated about mental health and how to recognise when either
themselves or someone they know is suffering. Awareness also needs to be drawn to how they can seek support. More research focused on adolescent health and mental health is needed to understand the long-term impact of health in adolescence and to contribute to the establishment of preventative programmes to help reduce long-term costs
Family, Friends and Fertility
No full textThis book is a collection of five articles designed with the overarching aim of providing a multi-dimensional, methodologically rigorous approach to the investigation of how an individual’s social network influences his/her fertility decision-making. So far, fertility research has largely focused on the effect of micro-level, individual factors or macro-level, institutional settings. This dissertation aims to integrate meso-level, social network factors into existing approaches. Different sides of an individual’s social network are investigated, including its use as a source of relevant resources and as a place where interactions between people mean that they are exposed to and influenced by others’ opinions and behaviors. Moreover, this study examines social relationships with different types of actors (e.g., family, friends, peers), with the intent of extending existing research, which has focused mainly on the family network only. The research covers all three phases of the decision-making process: the formation of an intention to have a child, the realization of that intention and the final behavior. In doing so, the interrelation between marital and childbearing decisions is also examined. Using different datasets and exploring different methods, this dissertation provides new insights into the importance of the role of social networks in fertility decision-making
Does Fertility Behavior Spread among Friends?
Get PDFBy integrating insights from economic and sociological theories, this article investigates whether and through which mechanisms friends’ fertility behavior affects an individual’s transition to parenthood. By exploiting the survey design of the Add Health data, our strategy allows us to properly identify interaction effects and distinguish them from selection and contextual effects. We use a series of discrete-time event history models with random effects at the dyadic level. Results show that, net of confounding effects, a friend’s childbearing increases an individual’s risk of becoming a parent. We find a short-term, curvilinear effect: an individual’s risk of childbearing starts increasing after a friend’s childbearing, reaches its peak approximately two years later, and then decreases
Fertility drain or fertility gain? Emigration and fertility during the Great Recession in Italy
Get PDFHow does emigration affect fertility in the country of origin? We address this question by estimating counterfactual fertility during the Great Recession in order to understand what the effect of the recession on fertility would be in the absence of emigration. Between 2009 and 2014, Southern European countries suffered from harsh economic instability, which triggered a sharp drop in fertility and a spike in emigration. We focus on Italy, exploiting the richness of the Italian Administrative Registry of Italians Residing Abroad (AIRE), which records information about all Italian citizens moving their residence abroad, as well as Italian birth records. Using an instrumental variable approach, which helps overcome endogeneity issues in the fertility-migration relationship, we find a positive impact of emigration on the total fertility rate at the Italian province level. This result suggests that emigrants are selected among those individuals who have a lower risk of having children. Therefore, in the absence of emigration, counterfactual fertility would have been lower than it actually is. Such a positive effect of out-migration on fertility in the area of origin could thereby lead to an underestimation of the effect of the recession on fertility
Child disability as a family issue: a study on mothers' and fathers' health in Italy
Get PDFBackground Disability does not simply affect the health status of the individual who directly experiences that condition, but it has important consequences on the health and well-being of the other family members as well. Focusing on Italy, an extremely interesting test-bed due to its strong familialist welfare regime, we show significant spillover effects of children's disability on parental health and well-being.Methods We use data from a nationally representative household survey on almost 13 000 mothers and fathers and adopt a multivariate regression setting providing evidence that the disability of a child is negatively associated with parents' health and life satisfaction.Results Parents of a disabled child report lower levels of general and mental health, as well as lower levels of well-being compared with parents with a healthy child. Strong heterogeneity by gender and socio-economic characteristics is observed, with mothers being more affected by the disability status of the child than fathers. The estimated coefficients suggest that education remains an important protective factor even for parents of a disabled child.Conclusion This study claims and documents that child disability is an overlooked source of health disadvantage for parents. Such disadvantage is especially relevant for mothers and lower-educated parents, evidence that suggests the importance of taking an intersectional approach to study health disparities
The influence of the family network on the realisation of fertility intentions
No full textThe gap between fertility intentions and behaviour remains a contentious area of theoretical, methodological and policy debate. Previous fertility studies have focused on individual and institutional characteristics, at the expense of the recognition of meso-level family social capital and networks. This study examines the realisation of time-dependent fertility intentions for the transition to first and higher-order births. Building upon and extending the previous literature we explore two competing theoretical mechanisms of how high levels of family social capital operate to either enable or inhibit the realisation of intentions and the impact of cross-sibling effects. Using two waves of the Netherlands Kinship Panel Survey (NKPS), we also introduce a methodological extension by examining whether the inclusion of only those with positive fertility intentions in previous research has resulted in selection bias. By adopting a probit model with sample selection, we both avoid this selection problem and empirically test whether there is a bias. Results show that there are some, albeit negligible, unobserved characteristics affecting both an individual's fertility intentions and the realisation of these intentions. High levels of family social capital operate to deter from having a child, particularly when individuals already have at least one child, suggesting that individuals adopt a 'satisficing' strategy. Our findings also suggest that children may operate as a means to generate family social capital. Having a sibling with a young child is associated with a higher probability to realise one's own intention to have a first child
Societal pessimism and the transition to parenthood:A future too bleak to have children?
Get PDFContemporary adults often cite economic uncertainty, global warming, and increasing inequality as reasons for intending not to have children. Despite extensive research on the impact of societal pessimism on attitudes towards out-group members, political preferences, and voting behaviors, its impact on demographic behaviors, such as fertility, has received little attention. This study examines the relationship between societal pessimism—captured through individuals' negative perception of the future of the next generation—and their likelihood of becoming a parent. Using data from the Dutch Longitudinal Internet studies for the Social Sciences (LISS), we use discrete-time event history models to estimate the probability of becoming a parent in a given year based on respondents' self-reported negative assessment of the future of the next generation in six distinct areas. Our results demonstrate that perceiving the future of the coming generation as worse than today is associated with a lower probability of becoming a parent. These findings suggest that surveys aimed at understanding fertility behaviors should incorporate questions about individuals' perceptions of the future, in addition to their own contemporaneous conditions
Social Contagion Effects in Fertility: Theory and Analytical Strategy
No full textA vast body of research has emphasized the role of social networks and diffusion processes in the adoption of “new” demographic behavior, such as the reduction of fertility to below replacement levels, as part of the demographic transition. Diffusion theories integrate the role of individual behavior in explaining macro-level changes but, until very recently, empirical evidence at the micro level was scarce. Recent studies showed the existence of social contagion effects on fertility timing in contemporary population among siblings, friends and coworkers. Humans are social actors who make decisions and act while embedded in a web of social relationships with kin and peers, and sociologists and demographers have increasingly been acknowledging the role of interpersonal interactions in shaping fertility decision making. In this piece of work, we review the main mechanisms and processes through which fertility behavior may become contagious among relevant others, such as friends, kin, and coworkers. In doing so, we highlight the main sociological theories explaining the diffusion phenomenon at the micro-level, as well as the challenges deriving from the difficulty of disentangling “pure” social interaction effects from selection and contextual effects. The relevance of this identification problem is evident in the active and large debate on possible empirical strategies to disentangle confounding effects from diffusion. We also provide a useful overview of the existent data suitable to analyze peer effect on fertility, and discuss the potential use of big data
The effects of social capital and social pressure on the intention to have a second or third child in France, Germany, and Bulgaria, 2004-05
No full textThis study investigates the importance of the effect of an individual's web of informal relationships with family and peers on the intention to have a second or third child. Drawing on sociological theories of social capital (help with childcare, emotional support) and social pressure, the study extends existing research by evaluating cross-national differences (between France, Germany, and Bulgaria) in the impact of personal network and institutional circumstances. It tests a non-linear relationship between social capital and fertility intentions. Social pressure and social capital are highly institutionally filtered, with the impact of personal network stronger where institutions are less family-supportive
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