Francesco Giudici

SPATIALLY WEIGHTED CONTEXT DATA AND THEIR APPLICATION TO COLLECTIVE WAR EXPERIENCES

In this article, we introduce spatially weighted context data as a new approach for studying the contextual dimension of factors that shapes social behavior and collective worldviews. First, we briefly discuss the current contribution of multilevel regression to the study of contextual effects. We subsequently provide a formal definition of spatially weighted context data, as a complement to and extension of the existing multilevel analyses, which allows the study of contextual influences that decrease with increasing distance, rather than contextual influences that are bound within discrete contexts. To show how spatially weighted context data can be generated and used in practice, we present a research application about the impact of the collective experiences of war across the former Yugoslavia. Using geographically stratified survey data from the Transition to Adulthood and Collective Experiences Survey (TRACES), we illustrate how empirical conclusions about the collective impact of war events vary as a function of the scale at which context effects are being modeled. Furthermore, we show how observed geographic patterns can be explained by underlying patterns of social proximity between the concerned populations, and we propose a procedure to estimate the part of spatial dependency explained by models applying specific definitions of social proximity. In the final section, we discuss the boundary conditions for the use of spatially weighted context data and summarize the contribution of the proposed approach to existing methods for the study of context effects in the social sciences.

Gendered Occupational Shifts in the Transition to Parenthood: The Influence of Personal Networks

This article investigates the influence of personal networks on changes of occupational rates of men and women becoming parents. It discusses and measures the effects of various interconnected dimensions of network structures and compositions, such as density, degree of overlap between partners’ networks, geographical distance between network members, and types of relations (family, friendship, or others). A set of longitudinal analyses on 235 couples becoming parents in Switzerland shows that for women, higher density in emotional support triggers a reduction in occupational rates once the first child is born, while for men, a higher density in practical support is associated with an increase of occupational rates, with a resulting increase of gender inequalities in the division of paid labour. Results are valid both for intended changes and for changes observed in the transition, and they hold when controlling for parents’ educational level, income and personal values about gender equality.

A sociological assessment of conjugal conflict

A sociological explanation of conjugal conflict was often stressed but seldom empirically tested. Based on a two-wave longitudinal dataset of 1534 women in heterosexual relationships, we use structural equation modeling (SEM) to measure the impact of the division of household labor, individualism and conjugal closure on the likelihood of conjugal conflicts. Results indicate that conjugal individualism has a major impact, division of household labor a minor impact, and conjugal closure no impact, on conjugal conflict. Results are discussed in the light of current sociological debates on partnerships.

The Demise of Mixed Marriage

This chapter presents empirical findings from the TRACES dataset. The authors tackle the issue of ethnicisation from a social demographical point of view, focussing on mixed marriages and their changing societal context. Marriages across the boundaries of ethno-national communities were an important topic of study already in the former Yugoslavia. They were considered as an indicator and a factor of social integration in the communist society. After the collapse of Yugoslavia, social scientists maintained their interest in intermarriages as an indicator of ethnic tolerance. In their own contributions, the two authors aim to make links between (1) the acceptance of mixed marriage from 2000 and later; (2) the possibilities of contacts between nationalities and (3) the patterns of marriage and family formation according to nationality. On the basis of the model of investigations developed in the chapter of Sekulic, two main hypotheses are proposed. First, the authors expect a positive link between possibilities of contacts and mixed marriages between two nationalities and assume that contacts facilitate tolerance between nationalities. Second, they hypothesise that strong dissimilarities in life course patterns of family formation create barriers in the “marriage market” against mixed marriages. They also wonder whether these two hypotheses actually complete themselves or compete between them. Overall, the results are nuanced and show that these links are strongly contextual.