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How do men and women's family life courses differ? Are gender differences in family life courses greater at higher or lower educational levels? And how does the intersection of gender, education and family life courses vary across different macro-structural contexts? This paper addresses these questions comparing East and West Germany during the German division (1961-1990). We thereby compare a strong male breadwinner model in a social market economy in West Germany and a universal breadwinner model in a state socialist system in the East. The analysis uses data from the German National Education Panel (NEPS) and employs two new sequence analysis tools: sequence discrepancy analysis and the implicative statistic for analyzing sequences of typical states. These tools enable us to scrutinize the degree, content, and timing of differences in family trajectories between men and women of different educational levels in the two sub-societies. In line with our expectations, family life courses were more de-standardized in the West compared to the East, and this occurred to the same extent for men and women in both contexts. While we find moderate gender differences in family life courses across all educational groups in the strong male breadwinner context in West Germany, for East Germany gender differences were significant among the medium and lower educated, but not among the highly educated. These findings underline the fact that the intersection of gender and education for family life courses is highly context-specific. They further suggest that different patterns of assortative mating play a key role for gender differences in family life courses. We demonstrate the added value of sequence discrepancy analysis and the implicative statistic to illuminate differences in longitudinal life courses between men and women or other social groups.

Previous work has found that later life urban-rural differences in cognitive health can be largely explained by indicators of cognitive reserve such as education or occupation. However, previous research concentrated on residence in limited, specific, periods. This study offers a detailed investigation on the association between urban (vs. rural) residence from birth, and cognitive functioning in older age. Using data from the Survey of Health Ageing and Retirement in Europe we created residential trajectories from birth to survey enrolment with a combination of sequence and cluster analysis. Using mixed-effects models, we investigated the association between residential trajectories in early, mid, and later life and three cognitive functioning outcomes: immediate recall, delayed recall, and verbal fluency. In a sample of 38,165 participants, we found that, even after accounting for differences related to education and occupation, rural (vs. urban) residence in early life remained associated with poorer cognitive performance later in life. This suggests that growing up in rural regions leads to a long-term disadvantage in cognitive functioning. Thus, public health policies should consider that urban–rural inequalities in early life may have long-lasting associations with inequalities in cognitive health in old and very old age.

Objectives Previous studies have shown the importance of individual markers of cognitive reserve, such as education and occupation, for cognitive health in old age. However, there has been only little investigation so far on how this relationship varies across contexts. Methods We analyzed data from the Survey of Health, Ageing, and Retirement in Europe, using second-order latent growth models, to assess the moderating role of welfare regimes on the relationship between education and occupation skill level in explaining overall cognitive functioning and decline in old age. Our sample includes 13 European countries using data from 5 regular waves of the survey (2004–2007 and 2011–2015) and 2 retrospective ones (2008–2009 and 2017). Cognitive functioning was modeled as a latent variable measured by immediate and delayed recall, verbal fluency, and numeracy. Results 74,193 participants were included from the survey. Our analysis showed that the association of education with cognition was weaker overall in Scandinavian countries, but stronger in Southern European countries, relative to Bismarckian ones. However, educational differences in the decline of cognition were more pronounced only in Scandinavian compared to Bismarckian countries. Additionally, higher-skilled occupations in Scandinavian countries had better overall functioning compared to the same occupations in Bismarckian countries, but there was no difference in the decline in cognitive functioning. Discussion Our findings indicate that the associations of cognitive functioning and its decline with individuals’ cognitive reserve markers (education and occupational skill level) vary according to welfare regimes, showing the importance of contextual factors in cognitive aging processes.

This chapter proposes a novel sequential mixed-method design that brings together the strengths of sequence analysis (SA) and qualitative comparative analysis (QCA). Both methods rely on an epistemological framework that combines analytical and holistic elements: they share the notion of analytically approaching social phenomena without disregarding their complexity. We apply SA as a first step to analyze the unfolding of phenomena over time. Specifically, through discrepancy analysis of state sequences, one can identify the time points when trajectories (start to) diverge from each other. In a second, explanatory step, QCA is applied to investigate whether, at such crucial time points, some particular configurations of factors are logically sufficient for the occurrence of a given state (or outcome). We provide an illustrative application to women’s employment trajectories in divided Germany by using data from the Adults Cohort of the German National Educational Panel (NEPS). By preserving the analytical and holistic perspective on trajectories, our proposed design highlights the dynamic of socio-demographic factors sufficient for women to be in employment or education at critical turning points over the life course. This design takes on the challenge, summarized in Abbott’s call for a ‘processual sociology’, to investigate both the dynamics of social phenomena as lineages of successive events and the complexity of contextual characteristics of ‘present’ moments. We conclude with an overview of research fields where our framework holds the promise of being applied fruitfully, namely life-course research, social stratification studies, policy evaluation, and comparative politics.

The relationship between processes and time-varying covariates is of central theoretical interest in addressing many social science research questions. On the one hand, event history analysis (EHA) has been the chosen method to study these kinds of relationships when the outcomes can be meaningfully specified as simple instantaneous events or transitions. On the other hand, sequence analysis (SA) has made increasing inroads into the social sciences to analyze trajectories as holistic “process outcomes.” We propose an original combination of these two approaches called the sequence analysis multistate model (SAMM) procedure. The SAMM procedure allows the study of the relationship between time-varying covariates and trajectories of categorical states specified as process outcomes that unfold over time. The SAMM is a stepwise procedure: (1) SA-related methods are used to identify ideal-typical patterns of changes within trajectories obtained by considering the sequence of states over a predefined time span; (2) multistate event history models are estimated to study the probability of transitioning from a specific state to such ideal-typical patterns. The added value of the SAMM procedure is illustrated through an example from life-course sociology on how (1) time-varying family status is associated with women’s employment trajectories in East and West Germany and (2) how German reunification affected these trajectories in the two subsocieties.