Age norms, family relationships, and home leaving in Italy

In Italy, decision-making about leaving home and getting married is shaped by age norms concerning extended coresidence. Young adults tend to comply with age norms when they perceive that their decision implies benefits and/or a violation will lead to penalties. Perceived parental disapproval reduces the influence of normative factors on individual actual behaviors, which suggests that young adults adhere to norms that are supported by parents

Education and family ties in Italy, France and Sweden

Education is actually a crucial element of social stratification. While research has often focused on education’s effect on labor market opportunities and intergenerational class mobility, it has seldom been analyzed its association with the structure of family ties. However, as a consequence of unprecedented demographic changes, multigenerational bonds are becoming increasingly important for the solidarity within families and the future sustainability of welfare state.The main argument underlying this study is that individuals’ level of education is likely to affect both the preferences and the structure of restrictions and opportunities. First, higher educated individuals are expected to acquire more individualistic values, and thus to be less oriented toward family issues. Second, the higher educated individuals are more likely to look for job opportunities in specific and selected areas, and thus to loosen family ties because of a greater geographical mobility.Moreover, the association between education and family ties is likely to be affected by the peculiar combination of institutional and cultural features. The country-specific context is, indeed, likely to pattern the structure of costs, opportunities, and individual preferences related to the maintenance of more-or-less strong intergenerational relations. Using data from Share 2004-2007, this paper assesses the effect of education on the relationships between family members in Italy, France and Sweden. In particular, empirical evidence is provided for parent–child geographical proximity and frequency of contacts

The social stratification in parent-child relationships after separation: Evidence from Italy

Objective: We investigate the association between parental separation during childhood and later parent-child contact frequency and whether it varies according to parental gender and education. Background: Separated parents, particularly fathers, have fewer contacts with their adult children than partnered parents. However, recent research suggests that highly educated parents are more involved, as they invest more in children before and after union dissolution. Method: Using data on young adult children (18-40) from two Italian surveys, random intercept models adjusted for sample selection bias were adopted to analyse the association between parental separation and later parent-child contact frequency. Results: Our findings show that adult children who experienced parental separation have less frequent face-to-face and phone contact with their parents. The negative association is stronger among fathers, but mother-child face-to-face interactions are also affected. Higher education does not reduce the effect of separation but even worsens it, at least with regard to face-to-face contact frequency. Conclusion: Our results suggest that in a country like Italy, characterised by a limited occurrence of separations and a traditional division of gender roles, particularly within the analysed parental cohorts, higher parental education does not mitigate the negative effects of divorce on parent-child relationships but may even exacerbate them. - Appendix: https://ubp.uni-bamberg.de/jfr/index.php/jfr/article/view/982/761Fragestellung: Wir untersuchen den Zusammenhang zwischen der elterlichen Trennung in der Kindheit und der späteren Häufigkeit von Eltern-Kind-Kontakten und ob dieser Zusammenhang in Abhängigkeit von Geschlecht und Bildung der Eltern variiert. Hintergrund: Getrennte Eltern, insbesondere Väter, haben weniger Kontakte zu ihren erwachsenen Kindern als verpartnerte Eltern. Aktuelle Forschungsergebnisse deuten jedoch darauf hin, dass Eltern mit hohem Bildungsniveau stärker involviert sind, da sie vor und nach der Trennung mehr in die Kinder investieren. Methode: Anhand von Daten zu jungen erwachsenen Kindern (18-40 Jahre) aus zwei italienischen Erhebungen wurde der Zusammenhang zwischen der Trennung der Eltern und der Häufigkeit der späteren Eltern-Kind-Kontakte mit Hilfe von Random-Intercept-Modellen mit Heckman-Korrektur analysiert. Ergebnisse: Unsere Ergebnisse zeigen, dass erwachsene Kinder, die eine elterliche Trennung erlebt haben, weniger häufig direkten persönlichen und telefonischen Kontakt zu ihren Eltern haben. Der negative Zusammenhang ist bei Vätern stärker ausgeprägt, aber auch die Face-to-Face-Interaktionen zwischen Mutter und Kind sind betroffen. Höhere Bildung reduziert diesen Effekt nicht, sondern verstärkt im Falle von Face-to-Face-Interaktionen sogar. Schlussfolgerung: Unsere Befunde legen nahe, dass in einem Land wie Italien, das durch eine geringe Anzahl von Trennungen und traditionelle Geschlechterrollen gekennzeichnet ist, innerhalb der hier untersuchten Elternkohorten eine höhere elterliche Bildung die negativen Auswirkungen einer Scheidung auf die Beziehungen zwischen Eltern und Kindern nicht abschwächt, sondern gegebenenfalls sogar verstärkt

Anomalous Weak Values and the Violation of a Multiple-measurement Leggett-Garg Inequality

Quantum mechanics presents peculiar properties that, on the one hand, have been the subject of several theoretical and experimental studies about its very foundations and, on the other hand, provide tools for developing new technologies, the so-called quantum technologies. The nonclassicality pointed out by Leggett-Garg inequalities has represented, with Bell inequalities, one of the most investigated subject. In this letter we study the connection of Leggett-Garg inequalities with a new emerging field of quantum measurement, the weak values. In particular, we perform an experimental study of the four-time correlators Legget-Garg test, by exploiting single and sequential weak measurements performed on heralded single photons. We show violation of a four-parameters Leggett-Garg inequality in different experimental conditions, demonstrating an interesting connection between Leggett-Garg inequality violation and anomalous weak values

Appennino: A GIS Tool for Analyzing Wildlife Habitat Use

The aim of the study was to test Appennino, a tool used to evaluate the habitats of animals through compositional analysis. This free tool calculates an animal's habitat use within the GIS platform for ArcGIS and saves and exports the results of the comparative land uses to other statistical software. Visual Basic for Application programming language was employed to prepare the ESRI ArcGIS 9.x utility. The tool was tested on a dataset of 546 pheasant positions obtained from a study carried out in Tuscany (Italy). The tool automatically gave the same results as the results obtained by calculating the surfaces in ESRI ArcGIS, exporting the data from the ArcGIS, then using a commercial spreadsheet and/or statistical software to calculate the animal's habitat use with a considerable reduction in time

Fully Frustrated Cold Atoms

Fully frustrated Josephson Junction arrays (FF-JJA's) exhibit a subtle compound phase transition in which an Ising transition associated with discrete broken translational symmetry and a Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless (BKT) transition associated with quasi-long-range phase coherence occur nearly simultaneously. In this Letter we discuss a cold atom realization of the FF-JJA system. We demonstrate that both orders can be studied by standard momentum-distribution-function measurements and present numerical results, based on a successful self-consistent spin-wave approximation, that illustrate the expected behavior of observables.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures, submitte

Does children’s union dissolution hurt elderly parents? Linked lives, divorce and mental health in Europe

Previous research has shown that parent’s union dissolution has negative consequences for individuals’ well-being, parent–child relationships and children’s outcomes. However, less attention has been devoted to the effects in the opposite direction, i.e. how children’s divorce affects parents’ well-being. We adopted a cross-country, longitudinal and multigenerational perspective to analyse whether children’s marital break-up is associated with changes in parents’ depressive symptoms. Using data from 17 countries and 5 waves of the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (2004–2015), fixed effect linear regression models were estimated to account for time-constant social selection processes into divorce/separation. The results show that across European contexts parents’ depressive symptoms increased as one of their children divorced. Furthermore, we found that parents living in more traditional societies, such as Southern European ones, experienced higher increases in depression symptoms when a child divorced than those living in Nordic countries. Overall, the findings provide new evidence in support of both the notion of “linked lives” and a normative perspective of family life course events

Emergence of Wigner molecules in one-dimensional systems of repulsive fermions under harmonic confinement

A Bethe-Ansatz spin-density functional approach is developed to evaluate the ground-state density profile in a system of repulsively interacting spin-1/2 fermions inside a quasi-one-dimensional harmonic well. The approach allows for the formation of antiferromagnetic quasi-order with increasing coupling strength and reproduces with high accuracy the exact solution that is available for the two-fermion system.Comment: 3 pages, 2 figures, submitte

A Physics-Driven AI Approach for Microwave Imaging of Breast Tumors

In this paper, an innovative microwave imaging (MI) approach for breast tumor diagnosis is proposed that employs a differential formulation of the inverse scattering problem (ISP) at hand to exploit arbitrary-fidelity priors on the inhomogeneous reference/healthy tissues. The quantitative imaging of the unknown tumor is then rephrased into a global optimization problem, which is efficiently solved with an ad-hoc physics-driven artificial intelligence (AI) strategy inspired by the concepts and guidelines of the System-by-Design (SbD) paradigm. The effectiveness, the robustness, the reliability, and the efficiency of the proposed method are assessed against both synthetic and experimental data