The long-term effects of out-of-home placement in late adolescence: A propensity score matching analysis among Swiss youths

The aim of this study was to examine the outcomes of out-of-home placement in adolescence. We used data from a longitudinal study of Swiss youths and measured all outcomes, including externalising problem behaviour, anxiety and depression, education, and self-efficacy at age 17. Propensity score matching was used to reduce selection effects and multiple imputation to treat the missing values. The findings revealed that youths who were placed in out-of-home care come from disproportionately problematic backgrounds, which complicated their proper matching to youths who were not placed in out-of-home care. Outcome analyses including multiple robustness checks suggest that negative outcomes among youths who were placed in out-of-home care are not so much due to the placement itself, but largely to pre-existing difficulties present already before the placement.

Health effects of work and family transitions

Disruptive life events, including transitions in work or family structure, affect health. Research often focuses on one transition rather than thinking of an event framework in which respondents experience multiple transitions across qualitatively distinct domains. This paper contributes original evidence on the effects of event interaction, transition timing, and multiple occurrences of events on health outcomes. I look at employment loss, employment gain, marriage, and divorce as instances of disruptive transitions or instability in the life course; I analyse these events’ effects on self-rated health and depression at ages 40 and 50. I show that employment losses and divorces have significant negative effects on health, and employment gains and marriages show smaller positive effects or null effects. Higher counts of transitions lead to stronger effects on health. Respondents who are older at event occurrence show larger negative effects, suggesting that work and family instability at early ages is not as detrimental to health as such instability at later ages. These results show that there are similarities across work and family domains in effects on health outcomes; moreover, experiencing several transitions can lead to overlaps in effects that might lessen or worsen health outcomes overall

Volume 9, No 1

Full issue Volume 9, No

Comparing methods of classifying life courses: sequence analysis and latent class analysis

We compare life course typology solutions generated by sequence analysis (SA) and latent class analysis (LCA). First, we construct an analytic protocol to arrive at typology solutions for both methodologies and present methods to compare the empirical quality of alternative typologies. We apply this protocol to develop and compare SA- and LCA-derived family-life typologies for women born between 1960 and 1964 in 15 European countries, using data from the Family and Fertility Survey. This paper contributes to the use of these classification techniques in four different ways. First, we present guidelines on how to establish the number of classes or clusters to use. Second, we show how to evaluate the stability of these clusters. Third, we provide a way to evaluate the validity of these clusters and finally, we provide for a formal heuristic to relate the stochastically defined latent classes to the distance-based clusters found with SA

Editorial: A critical life course stage

An introduction to this issue of the LLCS journal

TREE (Transitions from Education to Employment): A Swiss multi-cohort survey

TREE (Transitions from Education to Employment) is a Swiss nationwide longitudinal study that follows two cohorts of compulsory school leavers throughout their transitions from education to employment and middle adulthood. To date, the first cohort survey (initial N=6,343) based on the Swiss PISA 2000 sample has covered a 14-year period from age 15 to 29 (nine follow-up surveys). The second cohort survey started in 2016 (with one follow-up survey in spring 2017 so far; initial N=9,762) and is based on a large national representative sample of students (N=22,378) who sat a mathematics test at the end of the ninth grade (approximately 15 years old). TREE is designed to provide comprehensive data for the analysis of post-compulsory education, employment and other pathways (e.g. family and household situation, income/financial situation, critical life events, social integration and participation, psycho-social personal characteristics, health and wellbeing). As a social science infrastructure project of national and international importance, its data is freely available to the scientific community at large. This paper provides an overview of the TREE study with a specific focus on the latest data release (September 2016) for the first TREE cohort

Editorial: Time to take stock

Editorial from the outgoing Executive Edito

The impact of parental employment trajectories on the children’s early adulthood education and employment trajectories in the Finnish birth cohort 1987

The Finnish Birth Cohort 1987 grew up during the recession that hit Finland in the early 1990s, which had an impact on their parents’ activity in the labour market. In this paper we use Finnish register data to build employment and education sequences for all young people born in Finland in 1987 for the period 2005–2012 and employment sequences for all their parents for the entire length of their children’s lives from 1987 until 2012. The sequences were analysed and clustered, and four multinomial logistic regression models were used to find how parents’ trajectories connect to their children’s early adulthood trajectories. Most parents had been on a stable employment trajectory, but we found mothers and fathers who were absent from the labour market during the recession of the 1990s and after it – and some parents never entirely returned to work during this 1987–2012 follow-up. Likewise, most children were either on an employment or education trajectory, but we found groups of children who were on very early child care trajectories, unemployment trajectories, or on a trajectory with no records in the Finnish registers, which in the Finnish context implies that those young people are not employed, not in education and not receiving any of the various benefits. Disadvantageous trajectories were mostly very lasting. We found strong connections between parents’ disadvantages in the labour market and children’s disadvantageous early adulthood trajectories, even when adjusting for strong background variables. The strongest connections arise from parents’ long absences from the labour market

Moving up, feeling down: Socioemotional health during the transition into college

Moving from high school to college is a critical juncture in socioemotional health, and how young people fare likely depends on their academic settings and experiences. To examine variation in trajectories of depressive symptomatology among a sample of US youth who transition from high school into college, this study applied growth mixture modeling to data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health, which revealed multiple patterns of symptomatology over time that ranged from healthy to unhealthy. Adolescents appeared to have the healthiest trajectories when they experienced consistently competitive academic settings in high school and college. Overall, transitioning into college was a period of socioemotional vulnerability for some and wellbeing for others, but challenging curricula and contexts across this transition could differentiate between the two

Challenges of the third decade of life: The significance of social and psychological resources

Introduction to the special section on transitions in young adulthood