Search

This paper proposes comparative research on support provided outside the household by older adults in Europe. In studying social support, the network perspective is widely used, investigating, in particular, the ego-centered support networks of individuals. The analysis is based on data from Wave 7 of the Survey of Health Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE). It examines the characteristics of ego-support networks of individuals aged 65 and over in 12 European countries, which are grouped into a novel welfare regime typology. Through Multiple Correspondence Analysis, we jointly looked into the categorical variables describing the recipients (alters) of the support provided by older adults and the welfare regime classification. As a main result, countries grouped in “High degree of familialism by default” category specialized in supporting family-related alters, particularly with childcare or personal care. In contrast, the elders in countries belonging to “High degree of de-familialisation” typology provided a more varied but less demanding support, to non-relatives alters and less oriented to care. The analyses show that the SHARE provides a solid opportunity to face the topic.

Providing support outside the household can be considered an actual sign of an active social life for the elderly. Adopting an ego–network perspective, we study support Italian elders provide to kin or non–kin. More specifically, using Italian survey data, we build the ego–centered networks of social contacts elders entertain and the ego–networks of support elders provide to other non–cohabitant kin or non–kin. Since ego–network data are inherently multilevel, we use Bayesian multilevel models to analyze variation in support ties, controlling for the characteristics of elders and their contacts. This modeling strategy enables dealing with sparseness and alter–alter overlap in the ego support network data and to disentangle the effects related to the ego (the elder), the dyad ego–alter, the kind of support provided, as well as social contacts and contextual variables. The results suggest that the elderly in Italy who provide support outside their household — compared to all elders in the sample — are younger, healthier, more educated, and embedded in a more diversified ego–network of social contacts. The latter also conveys both the type and the recipient of the support, with the elderly who entertain few relationships with kin being more prone to provide aid to non–kin. Further, a “peer homophily” effect in directing elder support to a non–kin is also found.

L’articolo si propone di elaborare una previsione numerica del clero della diocesi di Milano, contestualizzata nell’evoluzione della situazione religiosa e demografica. Anzitutto si procederà ad un’analisi socio-demografica del territorio su cui insiste la diocesi, che porrà attenzione a questioni quali la fecondità, la partecipazione ai sacramenti, la pratica religiosa e la fruizione dell’Insegnamento della Religione Cattolica. Successivamente saranno illustrati, dopo averne indicato le modalità di calcolo, i dati numerici previsionali per presbiteri e diaconi fino al 2040. La conclusione vedrà una declinazione concreta delle previsioni elaborate secondo la distribuzione dei presbiteri nei decanati della diocesi.

The policies for containing the spread of the SARS-CoV2 virus include a number of measures aimed at reducing physical contacts. In this paper, we explore the potential impact of such containment measures on social relations of both young adults and the elderly in Italy. We propose two ego-centered network definitions accounting for physical distance in light of the COVID-19 containment measures: the easy-to-reach network, that represents an accessible source of support that can be activate in case of new lockdown; the accustomed-to-reach network, which includes proximity and habit to meet in person. The approach used for constructing personal (ego-centered) networks on data from the most recent release of Families and Social Subject survey allows us to bring to the foreground people exposed to relational vulnerability. The analysis of the most vulnerable individuals by age, gender, and place of residence reveals that living alone is often associated with a condition of relational vulnerability for both the elderly and for young adults.

Using data from the 2016 Family and Social Subjects (FSS) survey and the first wave of the SHARE Corona Survey carried out in 2020, we aimed to depict the social network characteristics of older people in Italy, with a special focus on tracing the changes related to the outbreak of the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

Providing support outside the household can be considered an actual sign of an active social life for the elderly. Adopting an ego–network perspective, we study support Italian elders provide to kin or non–kin. More specifically, using Italian survey data, we build the ego–centered networks of social contacts elders entertain and the ego–networks of support elders provide to other non–cohabitant kin or non–kin. Since ego–network data are inherently multilevel, we use Bayesian multilevel models to analyze variation in support ties, controlling for the characteristics of elders and their contacts. This modeling strategy enables dealing with sparseness and alter–alter overlap in the ego support network data and to disentangle the effects related to the ego (the elder), the dyad ego–alter, the kind of support provided, as well as social contacts and contextual variables. The results suggest that the elderly in Italy who provide support outside their household — compared to all elders in the sample — are younger, healthier, more educated, and embedded in a more diversified ego–network of social contacts. The latter also conveys both the type and the recipient of the support, with the elderly who entertain few relationships with kin being more prone to provide aid to non–kin. Further, a “peer homophily” effect in directing elder support to a non–kin is also found.

In the last years, two laws have deeply changed the regulation of marital breakdowns in Italy. Between these two, the law n. 162/2014 introduces the possibility of employing extrajudicial agreements for consensual separations and divorces and paves the way for more innovative behaviors, among couples without minor or economically dependent children. By the means of spatial statistical tools, the paper detects the geographical (at province/NUTS-3 level) pattern of the incidence of extrajudicial agreements for marital breakdowns over total number of separations and divorces. The spreading of these new procedures resulted as not homogeneous on the Italian territory as the individuals living in neighbouring provinces tend to display similar relative levels of extrajudicial agreements

The policies for containing the spread of the SARS-CoV2 virus include a number of measures aimed at reducing physical contacts. In this paper, we explore the potential impact of such containment measures on social relations of both young adults and the elderly in Italy. We propose two ego-centered network definitions accounting for physical distance in light of the COVID-19 containment measures: the easy-to-reach network, that represents an accessible source of support that can be activate in case of new lockdown; the accustomed-to-reach network, which includes proximity and habit to meet in person. The approach used for constructing personal (ego-centered) networks on data from the most recent release of Families and Social Subject survey allows us to bring to the foreground people exposed to relational vulnerability. The analysis of the most vulnerable individuals by age, gender, and place of residence reveals that living alone is often associated with a condition of relational vulnerability for both the elderly and for young adults.

This contribution aims at comparing patterns of social support -provided and received- among the elderly population in European countries. Adopting an egocentered network perspective, by means of multivariate techniques for categorical data, we intend to map the ego-support network structures of the elderly, as well as ego-network functional content of provided and received support in the different countries. Individual and country socio-demographic characteristics will be also considered in interpreting results.

Social capital is defined as the individual’s pool of social resources found in his/her personal network. A recent study on Italians living as couples has shown that friendship relationships, beyond those within an individual’s family, are an important source of support. Here, we used data from Aspects of Daily Life, the Italian National Statistical Institute’s 2012 multipurpose survey, to analyze the relation between friendship ties and life satisfaction. Our results show that friendship, in terms of intensity (measured by the frequency with which individuals see their friends) and quality (measured by the satisfaction with friendship relationships), is positively associated to life satisfaction.

This paper contributes to the quantitative literature on social support networks for childcare in Italy. As italy is a country characterised by a familistic welfare model, women who lack kin-based support networks, which are indeed a useful tool in this type of countries, may be disadvantaged. We considered foreign working women that have at least one cohabiting child in preschool age, and, using large scale survey data, we defined and built their ECSEN (Effective Children Support Ego-Network). We synthesized the networks observed into five main typologies through a cluster analysis, followed by an aggregative inductive procedure. This allowed to single out the support given by kin members and by other children, and to highlight situations of potential social frailty. We then identified three situations of interest that we further analysed through logistic modeling. Results underline the crucial role of living arrangements and of kin’s availability in shaping the ECSEN, highlight that, differently from other family behaviours, cultural background and country of origin play a marginal role, and identify some Italian specificities.

The need for support becomes stronger in situations of pressure, uncertainty and overload caused by unfavorable economic, demographic or social circumstances. Especially in countries—such as Italy—where an adequate welfare system is lacking, the individual’s social space can represent a resilience (anti-frailty) tool through the activation of a support network. While the literature has mainly analyzed the support that some vulnerable categories (e.g., elderly and youths) receive from their family, we focus on individuals living in Italy in the first stages of their family life, with the aim of describing their support network. We construct the potential support ego-centered (PSE) network—at partner and couple level—of individuals living in couple using data from the survey “Family and Social Subjects” carried out in Italy in 2009 by the Italian National Statistical Institute. Furthermore, we compare the network typologies detected using two alternative clustering techniques with the objective of finding the partners’ and couples’ network types and verifying whether traditional strong support received by the family persists in Italy and/or whether new kinds of support networks are emerging. Several PSE network typologies, ranging from empty to comprehensive networks, were determined with a fair match between the two procedures. Analysis revealed the importance of friends and neighbors, especially in the North of Italy, to the support of partners and couple as a whole.

Bike Sharing Systems play a central role in what is identified to be one of the six pillars of a Smart City: smart mobility. Motivated by a freely available dataset, we discuss the employment of two robust model-based classifiers for predicting the occurrence of situations in which a bike station is either empty or full, thus possibly creating demand loss and customer dissatisfaction. Experiments on BikeMi stations located in the central area of Milan are provided to underline the benefits of the proposed methods.

In this paper, a new resampling technique for sampling designs with unequal inclusion probabilities is proposed. The basic idea is to use a resampling design based on ppswor. Its main properties are studied, and its relationships with other resampling methodologies are discussed.

The aim of this work is to propose a new multivariate regression model for compositional data, i.e., vectors of proportions. It is based on a mixture of Dirichletdistributed components and it enables many relevant properties for compositional data as well as accounting for positive correlations. Despite the complexity of the model, its special mixture structure provides a greater flexibility and a richer parameterization than the standard Dirichlet regression (DirReg) model and, moreover, guarantees its identifiability. We illustrate the performance and the goodness of fit of our new model through an application to the last Italian elections data.

The paper aims at offering an overview of the complex current and foreseeable intertwines between criminal law and developments of artificial intelligence systems. In particular, specific attention has been paid to the risks arising from the application of predictive algorithms in criminal justice.

In this paper we investigate the non-economic determinants of international migration flows. We approach this problem using a Bayesian graphical model methodology which performs variable selection among a set of covariates that are potentially related to migration flows. We consider inflows to Italy from 171 different countries of origin on which we measure demographic and geographic characteristics. While results are coherent with the most recent literature, our method also provides measures of uncertainty around the dependence structure between covariates and migration flows.

A topic which is becoming more and more popular in Functional Data Analysis is local inference, i.e., the continuous statistical testing of a null hypothesis along the domain. This can be seen as an extreme case of the multiple comparison problem. During the talk, we will define and discuss the notion of False Discovery Rate (FDR) in the setting of functional data.We will then introduce a new procedure (i.e., a continuous version of the Benjamini-Hochberg procedure) able to control the FDR over the functional domain, describe its properties in terms of control of the Type-I error probability and of consistency. The proposed method will be applied to satellite measurements of Earth temperature with the aim of identifying the regions of the planet where temperature has significantly increased in the last decades.

The essay intends to give an overview of the interlinkage between finance and innovation, how digital technologies are changing financial activities on a global scale, the opportunities and risks that they offer and the approaches of legislatures vis-à vis these new phenomena. Emphasis is placed on the actions taken by the competent authorities of the European Union and of Italy

This paper focuses on network portfolio selection approach based on different estimation methods for the covariance matrix. In particular the sample and shrinkage toward the constant correlation estimators are tested. A case study based on asset belonging to banking and insurance sector is developed

International literature on individual behavior has shown the importance of the network of relationships binding individuals to the people who are close to them in everyday life. Family and other role relations are important sources of emotional and instrumental support, as well as social companionship. For the Italian scenario, the 2003 Generations and Gender Survey offers some challenges for constructing ego-centered support networks based on reasonable assumptions of the frequency of contacts and residential proximity of respondents with kin, friends and neighbors. Focusing on young Italian adults aged 18–34 years who are single or have a partner, we define two kinds of support networks—the potential support ego network and the effective support family network—with the aim of analyzing the effects of network characteristics (size and composition) on the probability of receiving help. Our findings show that couples received more support and more often than singles. Although singles’ potential support networks were more characterized by no family ties than the ones of partners, the availability of a “comprehensive” network or a network not “encapsulated” only in the family increased the probability of receiving help in both groups. Moreover, gender differences provide evidence of distinct behavior between partners in activating their network for (family) support.