Uncovering Social Stratification: Intersectional Inequalities in Work and Family Life Courses by Gender and Race

Enduring and accumulated advantages and disadvantages in work and family lives remain invisible in studies focusing on single outcomes. Further, single outcome studies tend to conflate labor market inequalities related to gender, race, and family situation. We combine an intersectional and quantitative life course perspective to analyze parallel work and family lives for Black and White men and women aged 22–44. Results using sequence analysis and data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY79) show that White men enjoy privileged opportunities to combine work and family life and elicit specific gendered and racialized constraints for Black men and women and White women. Black women experience the strongest interdependence between work and family life: events in their work lives constrain and condition their family lives and vice versa. For Black men, stable partnerships and career success mutually support and sustain each other over the life course. In contrast, for Black women, occupational success goes along with the absence of stable partnerships. Precarious and unstable employment is associated with early single parenthood for all groups supporting instability spillovers between life domains that are most prevalent among Black women, followed by Black men. The findings highlight a sizeable group of resourceful Black single mothers who hold stable middle-class jobs and have often gone unnoticed in previous research. We conclude that economic interventions to equalize opportunities in education, employment, and earnings, particularly early in life, are more promising for reducing intersectional inequalities in work-family life courses than attempting to intervene in family lives

From never partnered to serial cohabitors: union trajectories to childlessness

[Background:] Childlessness has increased in many European countries. Partnerships and parenthood are obviously closely related, but there is relatively little knowledge on how childlessness is linked to contemporary union dynamics that involve high rates of separation and unmarried cohabitation. [Objective:] To situate (biological) childlessness in longitudinal dynamics of union formation and stability, we take a life-course approach to union trajectories that consist of states entered via the formation and dissolution of cohabitations and marriages. Concretely, we identify groups of similar union trajectories of individuals between the ages of 18 and 39 who are childless at age 42. [Methods: We analyse register data on Finnish men and women born in 1969 and 1970 (childless N=3,241) with sequence, cluster, and multinomial logistic regression methods. [Results:] Four clusters of typical union trajectories were identified among the childless and assigned these labels: 1) Never Partnered (45%), characterized by never having entered a coresidential partnership, or just having entered a cohabitation near age 40; 2) Briefly Cohabited (25%), characterized by mostly living single after a brief cohabitation spell; 3) Cohabitors, Often Serial (19%), marked by typically discontinuous cohabitation; and 4) Married (11%). The Never-Partnered cluster is male-dominated. Men with a rural background and less-educated men and women are overrepresented among the Never-Partnered childless. [Conclusions:] For the great majority of the childless in our study cohorts, union trajectories are marked by either the (almost) complete absence of coresidential unions or fragmentary cohabitation histories. [Contribution:] The study contributes to the literature by showing that union histories, including never partnering as well as cohabitation instability, are key for understanding contemporary childlessness

Uncovering Social Stratification: Intersectional Inequalities in Work and Family Life Courses by Gender and Race

Enduring and accumulated advantages and disadvantages in work and family lives remain invisible in studies focusing on single outcomes. Further, single outcome studies tend to conflate labor market inequalities related to gender, race, and family situation. We combine an intersectional and quantitative life course perspective to analyze parallel work and family lives for Black and White men and women aged 22–44. Results using sequence analysis and data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY79) show that White men enjoy privileged opportunities to combine work and family life and elicit specific gendered and racialized constraints for Black men and women and White women. Black women experience the strongest interdependence between work and family life: events in their work lives constrain and condition their family lives and vice versa. For Black men, stable partnerships and career success mutually support and sustain each other over the life course. In contrast, for Black women, occupational success goes along with the absence of stable partnerships. Precarious and unstable employment is associated with early single parenthood for all groups supporting instability spillovers between life domains that are most prevalent among Black women, followed by Black men. The findings highlight a sizeable group of resourceful Black single mothers who hold stable middle-class jobs and have often gone unnoticed in previous research. We conclude that economic interventions to equalize opportunities in education, employment, and earnings, particularly early in life, are more promising for reducing intersectional inequalities in work-family life courses than attempting to intervene in family lives.Peer Reviewe

Neighbourhoods, networks and unemployment: The role of neighbourhood disadvantage and local networks in taking up work

We bring together research on social networks and neighbourhood disadvantage to examine how they jointly affect unemployed individuals’ probability of re-entering employment. Data from the UK Household Longitudinal Study ‘Understanding Society’ provide information on the proportion of friends who live in the same neighbourhood, and are linked with small-scale administrative information on neighborhood employment deprivation. Results indicate that neighbourhood employment deprivation prolongs unemployment, but only for individuals who report that all of their friends live in the same neighbourhood. Living in an advantaged neighbourhood with all of one’s friends in the neighbourhood increases the chances of exiting unemployment. In contrast, neighbourhood location is not associated with unemployment exit if one’s friends do not live in the same neighbourhood. We conclude that neighbourhood effects on exiting unemployment critically depend on individuals’ social embeddedness in the neighbourhood. Not just residing in a disadvantaged neighbourhood, but actually living there with all one’s friends, prevents individuals from re-entering employment. This opens new avenues for theorising neighbourhood effects as social rather than geographic phenomena, and highlights that the effects of neighbourhood socio-economic characteristics are conditional on the level of interaction residents have within their neighbourhood

Did economic globalization destabilize careers? Evidence from Germany

In this article, we analyze the impact of economic globalization on the turbulence of early work careers in Germany. We conceptualize turbulence as the absolute number of employer changes, the predictability of the order of jobs, and the variability of the durations spent in different employment states. Results from empirical analyses based on the German Life History Study (N = 5,432) show that – contrary to what is often implicitly assumed in careers research – there has been only a small increase in the turbulence of work careers over the last decades. Early work careers became slightly more dynamic for individuals born in the 1930s and 1940s, but for individuals born in the 1950s onwards, there are no significant differences in the turbulence across the cohorts. Additionally, we find no evidence that industry-specific economic globalization influences the turbulence of work careers. We conclude that researchers should consider the relative stability of careers and that the impact of globalization on work careers might be overestimated

Family life courses, gender, and mid-life earnings

There is a long-standing debate on whether extensive Nordic family policies have the intended equalizing effect on family and gender differences in economic outcomes. This article compares how the combination of family events across the life course is associated with annual and accumulated earnings at mid-life for men and women in an egalitarian Nordic welfare state. Based on Finnish register data (N = 12,951), we identify seven typical family life courses from ages 18 to 39 and link them to mid-life earnings using sequence and cluster analysis and regression methods. Earnings are highest for the most normative family life courses that combine stable marriage with two or more children for men and women. Mid-life earnings are lowest for unpartnered mothers and never-partnered childless men. Earnings gaps by family lives are small among women but sizeable among men. Gender disparities in earnings are remarkably high, particularly between men and women with normative family lives. These gaps between married mothers and married fathers remain invisible when looking only at motherhood penalties. Results further highlight a large group of (almost) never-partnered childless men with low earnings who went largely unnoticed in previous research.</p

The life course boat: A theoretical framework for analyzing variation in family lives across time, place, and social location

Objective: We propose a life course theoretical framework for understanding variation in family life courses between birth cohorts (historical time), societies (place), and social groups (social location). Building on the life course paradigm, we explain how key predictors on different levels of analysis can reinforce, precondition, counteract, preclude, or alter each other's influence on family life courses in specific contexts. The proposed framework re‐organizes and extends core principles of the life course paradigm into family life course predictors and outcomes on the individual, relational, and population levels. Background: The life course approach is a well‐recognized interdisciplinary paradigm in family research but often remains too abstract to guide hypotheses about family life course variation. Method: We demonstrate the utility of the proposed framework with a qualitative case study on family life courses in Senegal and a quantitative case study on family life course change between Baby Boomer and Millennial cohorts in the United States using sequence analysis. Results: Findings of the two example applications support that fertility decline in Senegal was primarily driven by material considerations and not by ideational change and that family life course de‐standardization was greater between White Baby Boomers and Millennials compared to Black Boomers and Millennials. Conclusion: Developing narrower mid‐range theories that fill the basic life course principles with substantive content and target specific fields of application, such as family life courses, is promising to advance life course theory

Aktuelle Entwicklungen in der deutschen Familiensoziologie: Theorien, Daten, Methoden

"Wie und in welchen Bereichen hat sich in den letzten 10 Jahren unser Wissen von familialen Strukturen und Dynamiken sowie den Ursachen ihres Wandels verbessert? Wo liegen die inhaltlichen Schwerpunkte der Forschung und welche Fragestellungen werden vernachlässigt? Welche Methoden werden in der empirischen Familienforschung verwendet, und welche Daten stehen zur Verfügung? Der Beitrag resümiert den Diskussions- und Forschungsstand zu diesen Fragen in der deutschen Familiensoziologie unter Bezugnahme auf die internationale Literatur. Neben einer Bestandsaufnahme der Forschungsschwerpunkte in den letzten 10 Jahren und einem Überblick über verfügbare Daten und Methoden fokussieren die Autoren auf die Identifikation von aktuellen inhaltlichen Forschungslücken und methodischen Defiziten. Es werden in drei Thesen Forderungen an die aktuelle sozialwissenschaftliche Familienforschung formuliert: Eine zeitgemäße, sozialpolitisch relevante familiensoziologische Forschung muss 1) neben strukturellen Faktoren stärker subjektive, kulturelle und soziale Einflussfaktoren familialen Wandels berücksichtigen; 2) mehr belastbares Wissen über die Leistungen und die Leistungsfähigkeit der Familie in unserer Gegenwartsgesellschaft gewinnen; und 3) sich stärker in angrenzende Forschungsbereiche einmischen, u.a. Bildung, Ungleichheit und Migration." (Autorenreferat)"How and in which areas did our knowledge of family structures, family dynamics and the determinants of family change improve in the past decade? Which substantive areas receive most attention and which questions are underresearched? Which methods are commonly applied in empirical family research and what can we say about data availability? This article reviews the current discussion and recent research on these questions in German family sociology in the context of the international literature. Next to a review of the substantive research foci in the past decade and an overview of available data and methods, we focus on identifying current substantive research gaps and methodological deficits. We formulate three requests for current family research in the social sciences: a timely family sociology that is relevant for social policy has to 1) pay more attention to subjective, cultural and social influences on family change beyond its structural determinants; 2) generate more knowledge on the contributions and capabilities of families in our contemporary society; and 3) intervene more forcefully into adjacent research areas including education, stratification and migration." (author's abstract

Sequence analysis: its past, present, and future

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