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Our sense of belonging rarely stands still, yet the research literature has hitherto paid little attention to the temporal nature of belonging. Based on an analysis of 62 Mass Observation Project (MOP) accounts written by people living in the UK aged from their 20s to their 90s, this paper argues that as people age, how they locate belonging in time shifts. This has to do with changing concerns related to belonging, but also to metaphysical issues of temporality and mortality, namely how people experience their own finite lifetime. The paper thus offers an illustrative example of how time can be empirically researched in sociology, with a particular focus on the important role that the future plays in how people construct their 'functional present' (Mead ). The central argument put forward is that time itself can be an important source of belonging, but one that is unequally accessible to people of different ages because of contemporary cultural scripts that present life as a linear progression into the future and construct the future as a more meaningful temporal horizon than the past., (© London School of Economics and Political Science 2017.)

In this paper data from a nationally representative British longitudinal study are used to analyse exchanges of support between Third Age parents (aged 55–75) and their adult children. Results show that between two thirds and three quarters of parents in this age group were involved in some sort of exchange relationship with at least one of their children. Generally, more Third Age parents were providers than recipients of help, but there was a strong reciprocal element to intergenerational exchange with, for example, married parents who provided support to at least one child being twice as likely as those who did not to receive support from a child, after allowance for a range of relevant parental and child characteristics. Parental characteristics associated with higher probability of providing help included higher income, home ownership and being married or widowed rather than divorced. Higher income and home ownership were, however, negatively associated with odds of receiving help from a child, again after adjustment for other co-variates, suggesting socio-economic differences in the balance of support exchanges. Children seem responsive to parental needs in that receipt of help from a child was positively associated with older parental age and with parental disability. The paper shows that in Britain, as in the USA, the balance of intergenerational exchanges involving Third Age adults is downward rather than upward, in contravention of depictions of older adults as‘burdens’ on younger generations. Current demographic and social changes are, it is argued, likely to increase support demands from adult children to Third Age parents in coming decades. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The increasing role for chosen friends is a key element in current debates on individualization and the transformation of intimacy. This paper describes the changes in friendship choices over time and demonstrates how life events subsequently impact on those choices. We primarily distinguish between kin and non-kin nominations of friends and how these may be related to the social and economic turbulence inherent in late modernity. Analyses of data from ten years of the British Household Panel Survey showed that kin nominations still form a significant proportion of all friends but increasingly so with age and over time as people age. Life events, such as divorce or death of a partner, have large effects on the likelihood of changes in friendship choices as did gender, age, marital status and social class. We frame these results in a discussion of the saliency and nature of friendship at stages of the life course and conclude that the case for a general secular shift to choosing non-kin friendships rather than kin-based friendship is not demonstrated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]