A cross-cohort description of young people's housing experience in Britain over 30 years: An application of Sequence Analysis

Methods. Sequence Analysis supported by Event History Analysis. Key Findings. Despite only 12 years separating both cohorts, the younger 1970 cohort exhibited very different patterns of housing including a slower progression out of the parental home and into stable tenure, and an increased reliance on privately rented housing. Returns to the parental home occurred across the twenties and into the thirties in both cohorts, although occurred more frequently and were more concentrated among certain groups in the 1970 cohort compared to the 1958 cohort. Although fewer cohort members in the 1970 cohort experienced social housing, and did so at a later age, social housing was also associated with greater tenure immobility in this younger cohort. Conclusions. The housing experiences of the younger cohort became associated with more unstable tenure (privately rented housing) for the majority. Leaving the parental home was observed to be a process, as opposed to a one-off event, and several returns to the parental home were documented, more so for the 1970 cohort. These findings are not unrelated, and in the current environment of rising house prices, collapses in the (youth) labour market and rising costs of higher education, are likely to increase in prevalence across subsequent cohorts.Housing, Young People, Sequence Analysis, Housing Tenure

Trust in government, trust in others during and compliance with social distancing: findings from the CLS COVID-19 web survey across four National Longitudinal Studies

This paper focuses on the changes in self-reported trust in government, others and compliance with social distancing during the COVID-19 pandemic for a subgroup of 9137 individuals who provided evaluations on three consecutive waves of a web survey (May 2020, September 2020 and February 2021). Sample members belong to four national longitudinal studies, covering ‘baby boomers’ (sixty-something’s), ‘Generation X’ (fifty-something’s), ‘Millennials’ (thirty-somethings) and ‘Generation Z’ (twenty-somethings). During the early days of the first lockdown (May 2020) members of the two older generations reported the highest levels of trust in government in contrast to their younger counterparts. This disparity between the generations held over time and whilst the tendency amongst all age groups was towards lower levels of trust a notable minority of respondents hardly changed their evaluations at all and, some cases reported higher levels of trust. At the outset of the pandemic older women tended to be more trusting of and in the younger age groups non-White (BAME) respondents reported lower levels of trust in contrast to White respondents. Longitudinal analysis consists of is a series of conditional regression models which include the influence of socio-demographic characteristics, living arrangements, work status, social contact and expressions of loneliness across each generation. Notably, women remain more trusting of government than men in the oldest cohort and having a degree is associated with a negative influence on trust for the oldest and youngest. Loneliness diminishes trust in government for the youngest cohorts whereas vaccine reluctance only appears to matter for the oldest. For ‘trust in others’, there is little to differentiate between cohort members apart from the negative association of loneliness amongst the young. Findings for compliance with social distancing suggest that women are consistently compliant even, when reporting vaccine reluctance. The final wave included two measures to assess ‘government performance’; how the government handled the pandemic and whether or not the government was doing all it can to reduce the spread of COVID-19. In the case of the former those with a degree are consistently skeptical. Additionally, in the youngest cohort, women are typically negative in their assessment together with those who experience loneliness. For the latter measure, women together with BAME respondents are consistently positive in their evaluation whereas, vaccine reluctance tended to be associated with negative assessments

Kinetic Accessibility of Buried DNA Sites in Nucleosomes

Using a theoretical model for spontaneous partial DNA unwrapping from histones, we study the transient exposure of protein-binding DNA sites within nucleosomes. We focus on the functional dependence of the rates for site exposure and reburial on the site position, which is measurable experimentally and pertinent to gene regulation. We find the dependence to be roughly described by a random walker model. Close inspection reveals a surprising physical effect of flexibility-assisted barrier crossing, which we characterize within a toy model, the "semiflexible Brownian rotor."Comment: final version as published in Phys. Rev. Let