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This first section shows that the concept of the interdependency of life domains is of utmost importance. Typically, such interdependency is detected when decisions, events and transitions in one life domain influence those in another, producing spillover effects. Spillovers across life domains take the form of resources generated or drained by one life domain that facilitate or hinder actions and well-being in another life domain. In this synthesis, we discuss how positive and negative spillovers across life domains can lead to a better understanding of life course vulnerability. We also relate the spillovers across life domains of related individuals and the way in which spillovers are regulated by the structural embeddedness into specific contexts. We illustrate our purpose through examples taken from research carried out by LIVES research program. We conclude by arguing that life domains interdependencies call for life course policies that explicitly consider spillover effects. Current policies addressing a specific life domain at the time have often unintended consequences that shall not be neglected. For instance, policies increasing pension age, do not only shape the employment trajectories, but have also have consequences on time available for leisure and care as well as on opportunities to relocate after retirement.

In Australia and other affluent societies people tend to report a number of desired children which is clearly higher than the number of children they eventually bear. In the effort to explain such an inconsistency, demographers have studied the correlates of the link between pregnancy intentions and births. Drawing on data from the “Household Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia” (HILDA) survey, we situate, for the first time, intentions and events in a unified and multidimensional life course framework. We examine the intention-outcome fertility link across a plurality of life course domains and in a genuine couple approach. Education, work, and residence are selected as domains closely related to the family formation process. Results show that pregnancy intentions are often part of a multidimensional life course plan and that the cross-domain effects are gendered and parity specific. Moreover, cross-domain events have stronger influence than cross-domain intentions. A change of residence is directly correlated with a childbirth if it is the outcome of a previous plan and the couple has already made the transition to parenthood. Resumption of studies is inversely correlated with the birth of a child irrespective of whether the event was planned or not by either one of the partners. Finally, a change of job decreases the chance of having a first child but only if experienced by the female partner while it decreases the chance of an additional child only if previously planned or experienced by both partners. Such results confirm the relevance of work-family conflict as one of the drivers of low fertility and outline the usefulness of a holistic life course approach in the analysis of reproductive decision-making.

Depression and psychological distress have high incidence rates among young people. Leisure is a known determinant of health and well-being and can help mitigate these phenomena through a variety o...

Older adults are at a high risk for loneliness, and community-based interventions can help reduce loneliness for all older adults in a community, regardless of their migration status. However, little research has investigated how older adults, including locals and migrants (in this case, internal newcomers and international expats) participate in these interventions. The “Neighbourhoods in Solidarity” (NS) are a series of community-based interventions that aim to increase social connectedness and reduce loneliness in older adults (55+) in the canton of Vaud, Switzerland. This longitudinal embedded mixed-methods study aimed to understand whether older adults (distinguishing between locals, newcomers, and expats) were aware of and participated in the NS, to assess whether participation was associated with changes in loneliness, and to identify relevant processes that could explain a reduction in loneliness. We combined a longitudinal pre/post survey (235 respondents) with ethnographic observations and informal interviews. Quantitative findings showed that individuals who participated in the NS did not have significant changes in loneliness. Qualitative findings showed that perceived migration played an important role in who participated, and that the community distinguished between two types of migrants: newcomers who spoke French fluently, and expats who did not. Individuals were only ‘local’ if they had ancestors from the town. Some newcomers and some locals used the NS as a platform to build a new sense of community within the NS, whereas expats rarely participated. This was due to linguistic and cultural determinants, institutional constraints, interpersonal relationships, and personal preferences.

Objectives We theorize and test the health of older adults as a result of their activity engagement, as well as a product of their spouse's engagement. Method We draw on 15 waves of couple-level data from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) Survey. Using responses of time engaged in nine different activities, we estimate Latent Class Models to describe activity profiles of partnered older adults. Given potential health selections into activity engagement, we lag older adults' activity engagement by one wave to examine its association with subsequent health. We then investigate associations between the lag of the spouse's activities with respondents' health, controlling for their own activity engagement at the previous wave. Result We find four activity profiles for men, and three for women. Respondents who were predominantly engaged in community activities generally report better subsequent health. Beyond their own activity engagement, for both older men and women, having a partner who was also community engaged associate with better subsequent health, though for older women, there were little differences between having a husband who was community engaged or inactive. Discussion Our findings highlight the value of considering activities of partnered older adults at the couple level.

Critical events are occurrences that create turning points, disrupt individuals’ life courses and affect wellbeing. Here, we investigate how the co-occurrence of critical events and, in particular, the spacing in time of events across the life course influences life satisfaction in later life. We argue that life phases densely populated of critical events may translate into an acute resource drain affecting wellbeing in long term more strongly than if the same events were sparsely distributed. We use retrospective biographical information on critical events in family, work, health and residential trajectories in Switzerland to construct a life course Concentration Index of events based on the number, the time-lag between the occurrences and the number of life domains involved. Our results show that the higher is the concentration in time of critical events, the stronger will be their negative long-term effect on wellbeing, net of socio-demographic characteristics, of the total number of events ever experienced and of the time since the last event. Furthermore, such negative effect is even stronger if the person experienced periods dense of events during midlife and older adulthood than during youth or early adulthood.

This article marks the occasion of Social Science Research's 50th anniversary by reflecting on the progress of sequence analysis (SA) since its introduction into the social sciences four decades ago, with focuses on the developments of SA thus far in the social sciences and on its potential future directions. The application of SA in the social sciences, especially in life course research, has mushroomed in the last decade and a half. Using a life course analogy, we examined the birth of SA in the social sciences and its childhood (the first wave), its adolescence and young adulthood (the second wave), and its future mature adulthood in the paper. The paper provides a summary of (1) the important SA research and the historical contexts in which SA was developed by Andrew Abbott, (2) a thorough review of the many methodological developments in visualization, complexity measures, dissimilarity measures, group analysis of dissimilarities, cluster analysis of dissimilarities, multidomain/multichannel SA, dyadic/polyadic SA, Markov chain SA, sequence life course analysis, sequence network analysis, SA in other social science research, and software for SA, and (3) reflections on some future directions of SA including how SA can benefit and inform theory-making in the social sciences, the methods currently being developed, and some remaining challenges facing SA for which we do not yet have any solutions. It is our hope that the reader will take up the challenges and help us improve and grow SA into maturity.

Background: Studies investigating the correspondence of birth intentions and birth outcomes focus mainly on women’s and men’s intentions separately and disregard the fact that reproductive decision-making is dyadic. Objective: We examine the intention–outcome link for fertility taking a genuine couple-level approach. We aim to understand whether a heterosexual couple’s conflict is solved in favour or against childbirth and whether the male or the female partner prevails in the decision-making. Methods: Drawing on data from the survey Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA), we perform logistic regressions in which couples are the unit of analysis and the variables are computed by combining both partners’ characteristics. Results: Results show that disagreement about having a first child is located between ‘agreement on yes’ and ‘agreement on not,’ with half of disagreeing couples having a child. By contrast, disagreement about having another child is shifted more towards ‘agreement on not’ and most often prevents the birth of a child. Women prevail in the decision of having a first child, irrespective of gender equity within the couple, while a symmetric double-veto model is at work if the decision concerns a second or additional child. Conclusions: Couple disagreement is not always sufficient to prevent the birth of a child in a low fertility country such as Australia, and the increasing level of gender equity within the couple does not necessarily imply increasing female decision-making power on childbearing issues. Contribution: The predictive power of fertility intentions is more accurate in models including both partners’ views. Fertility-related policies should consider the dyadic nature of fertility decisions.

Background: Spousal loss is one of the most traumatic events an individual can experience. Studies on behavioral changes before and after this event are scarce. Objective: This study investigates gender differences in pathways of volunteering before and after transition to widowhood among older adults in the United States. Methods: We use longitudinal data from the Health and Retirement Study and estimate fixed effects models with lags and leads to identify pathways of volunteering on a sample of 1,982 adults aged 50 and over. Results: The results show a U-shaped pattern with a decline in volunteering activities before the death of the partner and then a slight process of adaptation and recovery. The process is strongly gendered, with women considerably more resilient than men. Whether death was expected or not influences the effect of the partner's death on volunteering, likely due to the pre-death burden of caregiving. Looking at the role of the partner's volunteering before death, we found for both genders, but especially for women, that the odds of volunteering increase (decrease) if the partner was (was not) volunteering (complementarity hypothesis). Contribution: Given the positive effects of volunteering both for the volunteer and the society as a whole, our findings contribute to the literature highlighting that critical family events may affect participation in society of older people and demonstrating the heterogeneity of the effects, especially in terms of gender differences.

Background: Childhood socioeconomic circumstances and childhood adversities influence body mass index (BMI) in young adulthood, but it remains unclear whether these influences persists in old age. Moreover, it is still unknown whether social mobility and adulthood socioeconomic circumstances mediate this association. Objectives: The objectives of this study are to examine if (1) childhood socioeconomic circumstances and childhood adversities are associated with trajectories of BMI in old age, and if (2) these associations are mediated by social mobility and ASC. Methods: Using a sample of 10,277 women and 8,190 men aged 50-96 from the SHARE survey (2004-2015), we examined self-reported BMI trajectories using multilevel linear mixed models, adjusting for confounding (birth cohorts, countries) and control (health status, health behaviours, socio-demographics) variables, and for panel attrition. Childhood information (socioeconomic circumstances and adversities) were measured with a retrospective life-course questionnaire. Results: Preliminary findings suggested that BMI trajectories were quadratic concave shaped, with BMI increasing until around 70 years of age and then decreasing afterwards. Across childhood socioeconomic circumstances strata, BMI trajectories in old age were parallel, with a consistent gradient between the less disadvantaged (lower BMI) and the disadvantaged, among men and women; except for the most disadvantaged men, whose trajectories were steep concave (higher rates of increase and decrease). Similar findings were observed for childhood adversities. Social mobility and adulthood socioeconomic circumstances were associated with BMI trajectories but did not fully mediate the childhood socioeconomic circumstances and BMI and childhood adversities and BMI associations. Discussion: These preliminary findings suggest that childhood (socioeconomic circumstances and adversities) may have long-lasting influence on trajectories of weight change in old age. The influence of childhood was not mediated by the socioeconomic life course, including social mobility.

Objective: This study investigated the variability in activities of daily living (ADL) trajectories among 6,155 nursing home residents using unique and rich observational data. Method: The impairment in ADL performance was considered as a dynamic process in a multi-state framework. Using an innovative mixture model, such states were not defined a priori but inferred from the data. Results: The process of change in functional health differed among residents. We identified four latent regimes: stability or slight deterioration, relevant change, variability, and recovery. Impaired body functions and poor physical performance were main risk factors associated with degradation in functional health. Discussion: The evolution of disability in later life is not completely gradual or homogeneous. Steep deterioration in functional health can be followed by periods of stability or even recovery. The current condition can be used to successfully predict the evolution of ADL allowing to set and target different care priorities and practices.

Markovian models describe how the current measurement depends on the previously observed measures and on factors both observed and unobservable in the data. The dissertation underlines the several features that make Markovian modelling an interesting approach for life course studies focusing in particular on latent-based Markov models. In such an approach the dynamics of a characteristic of interest is explained by the evolution in time of a latent variable. This approach is particularly interesting in life course studies since many factors that are unobserved or difficult-to-observe in the data may influence a life history and can change over time. The dissertation discusses on a general framework for modelling longitudinal continuous data by the means of a latent based Markov model. The model incorporates a latent Markov process that governs the switching among regimes of change, the dependence between successive observations with an autoregressive component and the effect of the time-varying covariates. Empirical applications in population studies from three different sources are discussed.