Jean-Marie Le Goff

Embedded parenting? The influence of conjugal networks on parent–child relationships:

Data from a large survey of family functioning in Switzerland explore the extent to which various types of conjugal networks affect parenting and parent–child relationships (e.g., problems in assuming parental roles, parent–child disagreements, quality of parent–child relationships, and parental worries about the child). Results show that conjugal networks have significant indirect and direct effects on parent–child relationships but no buffering effect. Bicentric conjugal networks are singled out as indirectly associated with improved parenting practices and parent–child relationships. They strengthen the conjugal subsystem and improve the psychological well-being of parents. Interfering and unicentric networks have negative direct effects on some but not all dimensions considered. These results are important for understanding parenting and parent–child relationships within relational contexts larger than the nuclear family.

Meaning of Marriage for Men During Their Transition to Fatherhood: The Swiss Context

In Europe, Switzerland presents an unusual pattern of marriage with a very high proportion of couples who begin to cohabit without being married, but with a very low proportion of nonmarital births. A lot of couples marry before the conception of the child or during the pregnancy. In this article we focus on the point of view of men vis-à-vis the marriage and its meanings. Qualitative investigations show that men strongly desire marriage for several reasons, from their desire to participate in child rearing to the fear of having their paternity denied by Swiss institutions.

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.

Incitations for Interdisciplinarity in Life Course Research

Having gone through this volume, a critical reader might come to the conclusion that interdisciplinarity can be found more easily between the contributions than within them (even though several of them address it directly, e.g., Settersten; Mortimer et al.). However, the contributors share the common belief that studying humans’ unfolding lives in a web of complicated interactions within their changing contexts requires the adoption of an interdisciplinary research paradigm. To be sure, the life-span / life-course research traditions stemming from disciplines such as sociology, psychology, social psychology and demography certainly have allowed scholars to answer some key questions germane to this field (Baltes, Lindenberger, & Staudinger, in press; Elder, 1998). The empirical evidence accumulated over the years contributed heavily to the validity of the enterprise represented by life-course research (Baltes, Reese, & Nesselroade, 1977). The development towards interdisciplinarity needs, however, not only solid disciplinary foundations and the shared wish to cooperate, but also hard and timeconsuming work in interdisciplinary groups to progress concretely in this direction, possibly along the three lines sketched out in our introduction: constructing theoretical bridges between disciplinary approaches, building on common concepts that help describe and analyze life courses, and working on transversal substantive themes.

Using Life History Calendars to Survey Vulnerability

This chapter discusses the rationale for the use of life history calendars in studying social and psychological vulnerability. Pragmatic and substantive aspects suggest that life history calendars are powerful tools for retrospective surveys on vulnerability. Life history calendars are substantially more cost-effective and easier to implement than prospective longitudinal designs while being in line with the life course paradigm. They can be used as follows: to investigate how people react to negative life events and which resources come into play to overcome conditions of vulnerability; to understand processes of accumulation of (dis)advantages in relation to the concept of vulnerability; and to observe how such processes are constructed across the life course and across life domains. In addition life history calendars address the interconnection between the factual events and their subjective perception by participants. Thus data produced by life history calendars are suitable to different paradigms that apply life histories as a socio-cognitive process. This chapter presents four tools developed at the University of Lausanne and the University of Geneva with a special focus on the operationalisation of different aspects of vulnerability such as the study of accumulation and diffusion effects of (dis)advantages across life domains.

Family attitudes and gender opinions of cohabiting and married mothers in Switzerland

A regular increase of nonmarital births has been observed in Switzerland since the middle of the 1990s. This article aims first to investigate whether childbearing within cohabitation reflects a new living arrangement that replaces marriage or whether it is favored by poor economic circumstances. The second aim of this article is to examine whether married or cohabitant women can be distinguished based on their levels of subjective well-being (SWB), family attitudes, and gender opinions. Using a subsample of married and cohabitant mothers from the Swiss Household Panel (SHP), multilevel models reveal that childbearing within cohabitation in Switzerland does not reflect a pattern of disadvantage and that married and cohabitant mothers differ. Cohabitant mothers tend to be less satisfied with life in general, and tend to share a less traditional perspective on family, than married mothers. The research concludes that cohabitation could be considered an avant-garde family style that exhibits more equal division of tasks within the household.

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.

The Transition to Marriage for Cohabiting Couples: Does it Shape Subjective Well-being and Opinions or Attitudes Toward Family?

Although marriage and cohabitation appear to be increasingly equivalent across Western countries, extensive research has demonstrated that married and cohabiting individuals still differ in terms of attitudes and well-being. Married people tend to express higher life satisfaction and more traditional opinions and values, whereas cohabiters tend to report more depressive symptoms and a more egalitarian division of tasks. Little is known about the roots of these differences. This study focus on the Swiss Household Panel subsample of respondents who lived together before they married. Its aim is to understand whether degrees of traditionalism and happiness might exist prior to marriage or, alternatively, whether it is the transition to marriage that implies changes in happiness and traditional values. Results tend to demonstrate that individuals have a high probability of responding similarly before and after the transition to marriage and validate the former hypothesis. However, results also show that the variables that play a key role before the marriage do not necessarily play the same role after. That means that marriage contributes to changing the way people assess different domains of their life as well as the hierarchy of the importance of the sociodemographic characteristics that influence individuals‘ subjective well-being, and opinions or attitudes toward family.

Doping Risk and Career Turning Points in Male Elite Road Cycling (2005–2016)

OBJECTIVES Determine whether career paths of elite male professional riders explain the risk of being sanctioned for an Anti-Doping Rules Violation through the International Cycling Union. DESIGN, METHODS A discrete-time logit model explored the link between career path and ADRV risk in a database of 10,551 riders engaged in the first three world divisions (2005-2016), including 271 sanctioned riders. RESULTS Despite a longer career (7.8years), sanctioned riders have a precarious path. The odds of finding a sanctioned rider within those who experienced a career interruption is 5.80 times higher than for a non-caught one. 61% of the caught riders have experienced a team change. The odds of finding a caught rider within those who experienced such a change is 1.35 times higher. 44% of caught riders start before 23years, vs 34% for non-sanctioned ones. The odds of being sanctioned are 1.69 times higher for doped riders beginning before 23. The odds of finding a sanctioned rider are 1.94 times higher among those starting their careers before 2005 (establishment of Pro Tour), than those who started in 2008 or after. In that year, the Cycling Anti-Doping Foundation and the biologic passport were both launched. CONCLUSIONS Caught riders could have extended their more precarious careers with doping. The post-2005 generation effect could mean that riders are cleaner or slicker at hiding doping. The higher risk of being caught for riders starting after 23 might indicate that an early professional socialization reduces the risk by teaching them to be cleaner, or better at hiding doping.

Self-administered event history calendars: a possibility for surveys?

ABSTRACT Event history calendar (EHC) methods have received increasing attention from the life-course surveys that have been used in recent years. According to the literature, the EHC provides high-quality data in retrospective surveys because it replicates the autobiographical memory retrieval processes. EHC interviewing is processed through the visual display of individual life events, phases and transitions on a chronological calendar grid, which allows respondents to effectively link events as well as to identify and correct possible dating errors. Moreover, interactive interviewing facilitates the retrieval mechanism. In this study, we test whether the absence of an interviewer and/or interactive interviewing are associated with a reduction in data quality. This aspect is particularly relevant for surveys, as the absence of the interviewer would allow the implementation of EHC methods in self-administered questionnaires. In Study 1, an experimental design compared the results of self-administered paper-and-pencil EHCs in the presence and absence of an interviewer. In Study 2, a quasi-experimental approach compared the results of an interactive EHC interview with those of a self-administered paper-and-pencil EHC. Neither of these studies showed systematic differences between self-administered and interviewer-administered EHCs. The self-administered mode performs better when the instructions and layout design of the questionnaire are clear and detailed. Our findings suggest that the visual properties of the EHC could be a sufficient condition for collecting good retrospective data in the self-administered mode once the initial burden of the task is overcome.