Ursula Henz

The effects of informal care on paid-work participation in Great Britain: a lifecourse perspective

Several recent studies have documented a negative relationship between informal care-giving and labour market attachment in Great Britain. This paper examines the relationship from a longitudinal perspective using data from the Great Britain 1994–95 Family and Working Lives Survey . The first part of the paper studies the timing of informal care-giving to a sick, disabled or elderly person. This information is used in the second part to examine the effects of caring on employment. The results show that most carers look after only one dependant during their lives, and only around one-fifth to one-third look after a second dependant before the age of 65 years. Of all informal carers, about one-third had not been employed when they started caring for the first time in their lives, another third said that caring had no effect on their work arrangements, and about one-third reported one or several effects on their work arrangements, most commonly that they stopped working. Multivariate analyses show that semi-routine and routine manual workers report the strongest effects of care-giving. Part-time workers were more likely than full-time workers to reduce their hours of paid employment when they started caring.

Who Marries whom in Sweden

A popular song in Sweden is entitled „Love is not blind, but fairly shortsighted“, That is half way to a concession to a regular finding in studies of marriage patterns, namely that factors of little romantic flavor are important for partner selection. People on the whole tend not to „marry out“ of their social group, whether it be ethnic, religious, socioeconomic, or based on educational qualifications (for a review, see Kalmijn 1998). One explanation for such homogamy is that individuals, far from being blind for love, have clear preferences about their future marriage partner’s social and cultural characteristics. Such preferences may be about similarities, e.g., sharing cultural, life-style, or political interests (which all are signaled by educational qualifications). But also if everybody in the marriage market follows a queue principle in their preference order — such as preferring a well-educated spouse with high earnings potential — the combination of preferences and resources will lead to educational assortative mating (cf. Mare 1991).

Union Disruption in Sweden: Does Economic Dependency Inhibit Separation?

Abstract: This article investigates whether economic dependency is negatively related to separation in Sweden by examining the Swedish Level-of-Living Surveys coupled with annual register data on income. This provides the opportunity to study the relative income and the family status of a random sample of the adult population during (most of) a twenty-four-year window, 1966–90. Women’s contribution to the household income increased from around 20 percent in the mid-to late 1960s to 35–40 percent in the early 1990s. This may be a partial explanation for increasing rates of union disruption in Sweden. We find some, though not unequivocal, support for the hypothesis that the less economically dependent one spouse is on the other, the higher the risks of union dissolution. There is little support for the assumption that the total household income is negatively related to risks of separation, however.

Social class origin and assortative mating in Britain, 1949-2010

This article examines trends in assortative mating in Britain over the last 60 years. Assortative mating is the tendency for like to form a conjugal partnership with like. Our focus is on the association between the social class origins of the partners. The propensity towards assortative mating is taken as an index of the openness of society which we regard as a macro level aspect of social inequality. There is some evidence that the propensity for partners to come from similar class backgrounds declined during the 1960s. Thereafter, there was a period of 40 years of remarkable stability during which the propensity towards assortative mating fluctuated trendlessly within quite narrow limits. This picture of stability over time in social openness parallels the well-established facts about intergenerational social class mobility in Britain.