Volume 9, No 2

Full issue of Longitudinal and Life Course Studies journal, Volume 9, No 2

Disability and the transition to adulthood: A life course contingency perspective

Building on research on the social nature of health, we view disability as a life course contingency wherein effects are differentially consequential during the transition to adulthood based on interactions between disability type and institutional characteristics of life course pathways. Using data from the United States National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (n=2299 females and 2197 males, respectively), we utilise logit-link latent class analyses to model pathways to early adulthood and assess the effects of disability on these pathways. Results show that disability is variably connected to the transition to adulthood. Specifically, cognitive rather than physical disability is strongly connected to disadvantaged pathways, largely because it disrupts educational attainments that are the fundamental building blocks of the more advantageous pathways into adulthood and has effects consistently larger than several key sociodemographic indicators. Results are discussed with reference to life course capitalisation processes and a conceptualisation of disability in relation to the institutional logics and contexts that are the backdrop to contemporary role transitions

Residential relocations and academic performance of Australian children: A longitudinal analysis

The family and residential environments are critical to children’s wellbeing and, hence, residential change can affect children’s developmental outcomes. In this research, we study the associations between residential relocations and academic performance in the Australian context using panel regression methods on longitudinal data of a representative sample of 3,481 children born in the late 1990s from the Longitudinal Study of Australian Children (LSAC). We examine the impact of residential relocations from infancy to middle childhood and pay special attention to the distance, frequency and developmental age-stage of relocations on academic test scores from the National Assessment Program – Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) of third, fifth and seventh graders. Consistent with previous research, we find that the associations between childhood relocations and school performance are generally small. Frequent relocations during childhood relate to poor academic performance, but the association vanishes after controlling for family and home circumstances. In contrast, moderate levels of residential mobility, particularly relocations towards a different local area, are associated with improvements in academic performance. Relocations around the time of school entry are associated with poorer academic performance in grade 3, but are not associated with performance in grades 5 and 7. Our findings suggest that while moving home is not per se a major determinant of academic performance, the contexts and environments where children are embedded matter. We conclude that further research is needed on what and how intersections between relocation biographies and contexts matter for children’s development

From imputation to impact

The topics included in this issue range from the imputation of missing data in longitudinal surveys to demonstrating that their results make a difference in the public arena – both challenges to our research field the world over. Along the way through these pages, the papers include studies of various intergenerational transmissions of social advantages and disadvantages, and social predictors of the mental health of adults. As it happens, three Australian longitudinal datasets feature in these contributions, suggesting that the creation and analysis of longitudinal data resources is thriving ‘down under’

Do private school girls marry rich?

This paper considers for the first time whether there is school-type homogamy, and whether for women there are significant advantages from private schooling as a consequence of school-type homogamy. Its focus is Britain, where a private education is associated with substantial labour market advantages and where access is socially exclusive. We find that privately educated women are 7 percentage points more likely than observably similar state-educated women to marry privately educated men. Privately educated married women have husbands who earn 15% higher pay, according to the BHPS-UKHLS panel (20% at age 42, according to the British Cohort Study). Causation is not established and considerable caution would be needed if interpreting these associations as reflecting causal effects from private schools. The findings nevertheless raise anew the issue of the negative association between Britain’s private schooling and social mobility

Dimensions of family disruption: Coincidence, interactions, and impacts on children’s educational attainment

Household composition, economic resources, and residence are not necessarily stable across childhood. Changes in parental relationship status, parental employment, and residence have been shown to affect children’s educational attainment. Less studied is the fact that these events can occur in combination: families could experience more than one of these disruptive events within the same time period (e.g. year); from a life course perspective, families could experience multiple events throughout their lives. Using linear regression models to analyse data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, a longitudinal study of U.S. individuals, I confirmed that the children of parents who experienced employment loss or gain, or partner loss or gain demonstrated lowered odds of high school completion, college attendance, and college completion. Residential moves increased the odds of high school completion but decreased chances of college completion. I then found that experiencing two disruptive events within a given two-year period led to an increased negative effect compared to experiencing only one event. These findings robustly applied to different comparison group specifications. Finally, I showed that, generally, increasing the number of disruptive events decreased the probability of attaining the educational outcomes considered

Introduction to the special issue: Outcomes of children raised in out-of-home care

The aim of this special issue is to examine the outcomes of children who were raised for part of their childhood in out-of-home care, including in foster care and institutions. There is a growing body of literature examining the transition to adulthood for young people leaving care. While these studies generally show that youths raised in care are at risk of experiencing adverse outcomes in adulthood, the amount of literature is still small. This special issue was initiated to bring together studies on the aftercare experiences of women and men, from a variety of disciplines, covering different countries and historical periods.

A cohort analysis of subjective wellbeing and ageing: heading towards a midlife crisis?

Using eight waves from the German Panel Analysis of Intimate Relationships and Family Dynamics (pairfam), we analyse how different domains of subjective wellbeing evolve within seven years (2008–2015) in three different cohorts born 10 years apart (1971/73, 1981/83, and 1991/93). This study contributes to the ongoing debate about subjective wellbeing following a U-shaped pattern over the life course. In four domains our results show the first half of such a U-shaped pattern: on average, general life satisfaction – as well as satisfaction with leisure time, social contacts and friends, and family – declines substantially between the ages of 15 and 44, with the most significant decrease taking place at a young age (early 20s). Nevertheless, trajectories among the three cohorts differ markedly, indicating that, ceteris paribus, responses on subjective wellbeing differ greatly between cohorts born just a decade apart. The results further indicate that the two older cohorts assess family life and social contacts more favourably than the youngest cohort

Review of 'Pathways to Adulthood'

A review of 'Pathways to Adulthood: Educational opportunities, motivation and attainment in times of social change' by Ingrid Schoon and Rainer K. Silbereisen (Eds), 2017. UCL Institute of Education Press, ISBN: 978-1-78277-208-

Sensitivity analysis within multiple imputation framework using delta-adjustment: Application to Longitudinal Study of Australian Children

Multiple imputation (MI) is a powerful statistical method for handling missing data. Standard implementations of MI are valid under the unverifiable assumption of missing at random (MAR), which is often implausible in practice. The delta-adjustment method, implemented within the MI framework, can be used to perform sensitivity analyses that assess the impact of departures from the MAR assumption on the final inference. This method requires specification of unknown sensitivity parameter(s) (termed as delta(s)).We illustrate the application of the delta-adjustment method using data from the Longitudinal Study of Australian Children, where the epidemiological question is to estimate the association between exposure to maternal emotional distress at age 4–5 years and total (social, emotional, and behavioural) difficulties at age 8–9 years. We elicited the sensitivity parameters for the outcome (????????) and exposure (????????) variables from a panel of experts. The elicited quantile judgements from each expert were converted into a suitable parametric probability distribution and combined using the linear pooling method. We then applied MI under MAR followed by sensitivity analyses under missing not at random (MNAR) using the delta-adjustment method. We present results from sensitivity analyses that used different percentile values of the pooled distributions for the delta parameters for ???????? and ????????, and demonstrate that twofold increases in the magnitude of the association between maternal distress and total difficulties are only observed for large departures from MAR