Intergenerational Transmission Processes Research Articles

Does being an older parent attenuate the intergenerational transmission of parenting?

Evidence that the transition to parenthood is occurring at older ages in the Western world, that older parents provide more growth-facilitating care than do younger ones, and that most prospective studies of the intergenerational transmission of parenting have focused on relatively young parents led us to evaluate whether parental age might moderate-and attenuate-the intergenerational transmission of parenting. On the basis of the seemingly commonsensical assumption that as individuals age they often become more psychologically mature and have more opportunity to reflect upon and free themselves from the legacy of childhood experiences, we hypothesized that deferring parenting would weaken links between rearing experiences in the family of origin and parenting in the family of procreation. To test this proposition we repeated analyses reported by Belsky, Jaffee, Sligo, Woodward, and Silva (2005) on 227 parents averaging 23 years of age linking rearing experiences repeatedly measured from 3 to 15 years of age with observed parenting in adulthood; we added 273 participants who became parents at older ages than did those in the original sample. Although previously reported findings showing that rearing history predicted mothering but not fathering reemerged, parental age generally failed to moderate the intergenerational transmission of parenting. Other investigators prospectively following children and adults into adulthood and studying the intergenerational transmission process should determine whether these null results vis-à-vis the attenuation of transmission with age obtain when parents with older children are studied or when other methods are used. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved).

Intergenerational Transmission Effects on Relationship Satisfaction

Although intergenerational transmission processes have been studied on various aspects of family life, cross-cultural comparisons have rarely been made. In the present study, the authors examine how intergenerational transmission processes on relationship satisfaction differ between individuals with different gender and cultural identities. A multigroup structural equation modeling analysis compares the influence of family-of-origin factors on relationship satisfaction between Asian-born Asian, North American–born Asian, and Caucasian American heterosexual couples. Results suggest that Asian-born Asians experience greater influence from their family-of-origin than North American–born Asians and Caucasians. Males experience greater influence from their family-of-origin than females in Asian couples whereas females experience greater influence in Caucasian couples. The results suggest that both cultural identity and gender have an impact on the intergenerational transmission of relationship quality. The findings underscore the need for further exploration of the mechanisms of the intergenerational transmission processes in different contexts.

Tussen Nederland en Marokko - Waar voelen Marokkaans-Nederlandse remigranten- en achtergelaten kinderen in Marokko zich thuis?

In between the Netherlands and Morocco. Where do Dutch Moroccan return migrants and abandoned children in Morocco feel at home? .Return migrant and abandoned children form a largely neglected research field. For years Dutch policy makers have been asked to pay attention to Dutch Moroccan children in Morocco, but without much result. These children often grew up in the Netherlands and the question arises whether they are able to feel at home in Morocco. A main explanatory factor is age: return migrant children tend to be older at the point of return and strongly wish to return to the Netherlands, while younger abandoned children tend to identify with both countries. However, they also wish to go to the Netherlands one day, which seems to result from the process of intergenerational transmission.

Unforeseen Consequences of Mothers' Return to School: Children's Educational Aspirations and Outcomes

Parents' educational attainment is generally completed before offspring are born. Thus, there is little opportunity to study the ways in which children's observation of their parents' pursuit of education may augment the effects of structural factors on intergenerational transmission processes. In this article, the authors use qualitative and quantitative data collected from thirty-five women across a decade following their return to school to examine the effects of children's observations of their mothers' educational achievements on the children's educational aspirations and achievements in adulthood. The return to school was consequential only when mothers completed their degrees; when they did not, their enrollment appears to have had little or no effect on children's educational achievements. Mothers' completion of college was found to be the most important for children's educational outcomes when fathers were less educated and opposed to mothers' enrollment and when the return to school was fueled by personal and psychological, rather than career, motivations.

Parental Influence on Work and Family Plans of Adolescents of Different Ethnic Backgrounds in The Netherlands

This paper examined the work and family plans of adolescents from five different ethnic origins. The way in which parents influence these plans was studied by using a representative sample of secondary school pupils (N = 52,000) in The Netherlands. Results showed that substantial proportions of adolescents had traditional work and family plans. The study showed that work and family plans of adolescents of non-Dutch origin overall were at least as egalitarian as those of Dutch origin. Girls of all ethnic origins held more egalitarian plans than boys. Logistic regression analyses revealed that adolescents’ plans were associated with parents’ socio-demographic characteristics and role-modeling. The processes of intergenerational transmission were found to be highly similar for girls and boys in all ethnic groups.

Intergenerational Transmission of Values: Family Generativity and Adolescents' Narratives of Parent and Grandparent Value Teaching

In this longitudinal study, we compared family stories told by 32 Canadian adolescents at ages 16 and 20 about how parents and grandparents had taught them values. Relations to parents' and children's levels of generativity were also examined. Adolescents' stories of grandparent value teaching were less readily recalled and less interactive in their content compared with stories about parents. Stories of value teaching by more generative parents were more likely to involve specific episodes, to be more interactive, to be more likely to emphasize caring content, and to be less likely to have their message rejected by the teens. Similarly, when parents were more generative, adolescents' stories about grandparents' value teaching were also more likely to involve specific and interactive episodes. Finally, stories told about parents and grandparents that were more positive on these dimensions predicted higher generative concern scores for the adolescents themselves, measured subsequently at age 24. Adolescents' stories about parent and grandparent socialization in more generative family contexts thus have features that suggest a more compelling process of intergenerational value transmission.

Parental Influence On Union Formation Preferences Among Turkish, Moroccan, and Dutch Adolescents in the Netherlands

This study first examines union formation preferences of Turkish, Moroccan, and Dutch adolescents. Second, the study shows how and to what extent parents are of influence on these preferences. Hypotheses are derived from cross-cultural psychology and theories on intergenerational transmission. Self-reported data of approximately 19,000 Dutch, 460 Turkish, and 400 Moroccan adolescents 11 to 23 years of age are used to test the hypotheses. Youth with a Turkish and Moroccan background, particularly those with a strong ethnic identification, more often prefer marriage than Dutch youth. Unmarried cohabitation (before marriage) is most popular among Dutch adolescents, but substantial proportions of immigrant youth also prefer this type of relationship. In addition, both parental characteristics and characteristics of the parent—child relationship are of major influence for adolescents' union formation preferences. The process of intergenerational transmission is found to be largely comparable among all groups.

Timing Preferences for Women’s Family‐Life Transitions: Intergenerational Transmission Among Migrants and Dutch

This study examines the transmission of preferences regarding the timing of family‐life transitions of women among migrant and native Dutch families. We study how and to what extent parental preferences, migrant origin, and family characteristics affect the child’s timing preferences. We use parent and child data (N= 1,290) from the Netherlands Kinship Panel Study (2002, 2003) and the Social Position and Provisions Ethnic Minorities Survey (2002). Regression analyses reveal that parental timing preferences regarding family‐life transitions are strongly associated with the timing preferences of their children. Analyses also show that these preferences strongly vary by migrant origin, educational level, and religious involvement. The process of intergenerational transmission, however, is found to be very similar among migrants and Dutch.

Region, Industry, and Intergenerational Status Transmission in Urban Brazil

This article presents a cautious analysis about regional and industrial variations in the process of status transmission in Brazil. It draws upon a disparate literature spanning that on the organizational structures of industries, the socioeconomic patterns of development, and modernization theory to derive testable hypotheses. The hypothesis tests are based on the estimation of Two-Level Hierarchical Linear Models (HLM). The dependent variable is the socioeconomic status of one's occupation. The first level independent variables represent individual characteristics (sex, age, schooling, and the father's socioeconomic status of occupation). The second level independent variables represent economic sectors' characteristics (based on regional and industrial segmentations). The data for the hypothesis tests come from the Brazilian National Household Sample Surveys (PNADs) from 1973, 1982, 1988, and 1996. The main hypothesis tests are related to the "slope as outcome" model. It is tested whether the second level variables (related to the regional/industrial segmentation) have any impact on the effect of the father's socioeconomic status on the socioeconomic status of his sons/daughters. In other words, it is assessed whether economic segmentation variables mediate the intergenerational status transmission in Brazil. The final results show that neither regional and industrial segmentations nor economic development levels seem to have much a role as mediators of the process of intergenerational transmission of occupational status in Brazil. This brings to the conclusion that the process of intergenerational status transmission in Brazil is very stable in both cross-sectional and temporal ways.

Changing intergenerational relationship

This article explores the literature on intergenerational relationships within psychological and sociological disciplines. After a brief description of the different meanings of the term ‘generation’, two theoretical perspectives are discussed: Mannheim's theory of generations and Bengston and colleagues' theory of intergenerational solidarity. Particular attention is given to the process of intergenerational transmission. This is followed by a rereading of the concept of generation in light of the relational–intergenerational perspective. This perspective attempts to consider together family and social generations, taken to be interdependent. The application of this perspective to the transition to adulthood is crucial to an understanding of intergenerational dynamics, whether in the family or in the community. It concludes with reflections on the meaning of the intergenerational transmission as seen from the relational-intergenerational perspective and recent research findings.

An “impossible” transmission: Youth religious memories in Guinea–Conakry

ABSTRACTMemory, persistence, and cultural transmission are hot topics in anthropology today. Contributing to an increasing anthropological interest in youth agency, in this article I invite readers to look at youth as a crucial site for understanding issues of religious memory and cultural transmission. In the past five decades, Bulongic people (Guinea–Conakry) have undergone significant religious changes caused by the introduction of Islam, which has led to the official disappearance of pre‐Islamic rituals. In this article, I explore how young Bulongic remember a pre‐Islamic past that they have never experienced. I argue that, to understand how they assimilate and perpetuate this religious heritage, one must examine the subtle processes of intergenerational transmission through which their memories are dynamically shaped.

Translating Bourdieu: cultural capital and the English middle class in historical perspective

This article examines the ways in which Pierre Bourdieu's work on culture and cultural capital can be applied to the study of the English middle class in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Drawing on a wide historical literature, the article argues for the significance of culture as a constitutive element of middle-class identities in England since 1800. It goes on to examine Bourdieu's ideas of 'objectivated', 'instutionalized' and 'incorporated' cultural capital, in the context of family, inheritance, education and the body. The article identifies changes in the historical forms which cultural capital has taken and emphasizes the importance of analysing family processes of intergenerational transmission.

Intergenerational Income Mobility Among Daughters

New evidence on daughters' intergenerational mobility in a framework that encompasses women not in the labor force, using broader measures of economic status than just the women's own earnings, is presented, and the role of husbands' earnings is highlighted. A parallel analysis of sons' mobility is performed. Intergenerational transmission of income status may be weaker for daughters than for sons, but is still quite substantial. Assortative mating is an important element in the intergenerational transmission process.

Determinants of the Educational Performance in Brazil

Despite the high estimated returns to schooling, the Brazilian educational indicators have been below international standards over the years. Worse, the poorer the family the lower human capital investment is. Since the individual probability of being poor is strongly determined by the educational level, there exists a process of intergenerational transmission of poverty. The main goal of this article is to investigate the determinants of the weak educational performance in Brazil. The analysis focus on 11-to-25-year-old individuals, living in urban areas of the Northeast and Southeast regions. Four individual educational level determinants are investigated: the availability and quality of the educational services, the attractiveness of the labor market, the availability of family resources (financial and non-financial), and the amount of resources in the community where the individual lives. Similar to previous works, family attributes appear to be the most important. Furthermore, the results suggest that attractive labor markets are related to lower levels of schooling.

Immigrant and Ethnic Minority families: An Introduction

The impact of intergenerational transmission processes on the intercultural contact and ethnic identification of second generation adolescents is studied in five different groups of migrant families: Italian, Greek, and Turkish work migrants, German repatriates from Russia, and Jewish immigrants from Russia to Israel. In each group, 400 dyads of parents and adolescents with the same sex were interviewed with a standardized questionnaire in the language of origin or of the receiving society. Four possible outcomes of intercultural contact are distinguished: integration, assimilation, segregation, and marginalization. An explanatory model is proposed that relates these possible outcomes systematically to the availability of social and cultural capital in migrant families and to intergenerational transmission processes. The empirical analysis compares measurement for ethnic identification and network characteristics for the parent and the child generation as an indication of intergenerational transmission. It reveals considerable variability between migrant groups which can not be explained by classical assimilation theory and thus demonstrate the adequacy of the suggested model.

Intercultural Contact and Intergenerational Transmission in Immigrant Families

The impact of intergenerational transmission processes on the intercultural contact and ethnic identification of second generation adolescents is studied in five different groups of migrant families: Italian, Greek, and Turkish work migrants, German repatriates from Russia, and Russian Jewish immigrants in Israel. In each group, 400 same-sex dyads of parents and adolescents were interviewed by means of a standardized questionnaire in the language of origin or of the receiving society. Four possible outcomes of intercultural contact are distinguished: integration, assimilation, segregation, and marginalization. An explanatory model is proposed that systematically relates these possible outcomes to the availability of social and cultural capital in migrant families and to intergenerational transmission processes. The empirical analysis using structural equation modeling compares the results for each migrant group. It reveals considerable variability between migrant groups that cannot be explained by classical assimilation theory, thus demonstrating the adequacy of the suggested model.

Public Policies and the Dynamics of Cultural Values in the Welfare State

This paper analyzes the dynamics of the distribution of a population of some of the cultural traits and norms which might be associated to the support for Welfare State as a system for the provision of public goods and as a redistributive mechanism. Cultural traits and norms are acquired through a process of intergenerational cultural transmission and socialization. we emphasize the existence of a two-way causality between the evolution of cultural traits and norms and the political outcomes, which possibly generates, in the Welfare State, multiple self-fulfilling equilibrium paths of cultural evolution, public provision of goods and redistribution. Ideologies related to the public provision of particular goods can be rationalized as coordination mechanisms allowing cultural groups to preserve or shift political power in favor of particular long run profiles of cultural traits and norms.

In Memoriam: Robert B. Cairns

Robert B. Cairns, Ph.D., Director of the Center for Developmental Science and Cary C. Boshamer Professor of Psychology at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, died November 10, 1999. Bob Cairns devoted his life to the study of behavior development. He was recognized internationally for his work in social development, the longitudinal analysis of antisocial behavior, and his pioneering efforts to build an interdisciplinary developmental science. His approach to the study of development fused work from the biobehavioral, psychological, and social domains and broke new ground in understanding continuity and change in aggressive behavior. Although he was foremost a developmental theorist and social scientist, Bob steadfastly believed that basic empirical research needed to be informed by and then applied to real-life issues. He actively developed collaborative relationships with applied researchers in special education and other disciplines that provide direct services to youth with emotional and behavioral disorders (E/BD). By conducting cutting-edge science with a careful eye on implications for practice, he advanced the knowledge base on the development of antisocial patterns in ways that should contribute to the prevention and treatment of disruptive behavioral disorders for many decades to come. As a graduate student in psychology at Stanford University in the late 1950s, Bob explored the social learning foundations of behavior development. For him, social learning involved more than the acquisition of knowledge through behavior imitation. From his perspective, behavior develops in the midst of dynamic social interchanges. He believed that social behavior tends to be synchronized with the behavior of others and that individuals tend to interact with their environments in ways that promote the establishment, consolidation, and generalization of behavior. In the mid-1960s, he was an NIH special fellow at the Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor, Maine, where he developed expertise in developmental genetics and the microanalysis of social interactions in animals. From the late 1960s until his death, he investigated social, biological, and genetic factors in the development of aggression by augmenting naturalistic longitudinal research in humans with parallel investigations in behavior genetics with animals. This work led him to conclude that social interactions provide the link between the environmental context and internal states and, thus, play a primary role in the continuity and change of the characteristics of the individual. In 1981 Bob and his wife, Beverley D. Cairns, began a longitudinal study of 695 youth in the fourth and seventh grades. This investigation, known as the Carolina Longitudinal Study (CLS), collected annual data on youths' social, academic, and behavioral adjustment in school and at home. A unique aspect of the CLS is that contemporaneous data were collected on social contextual factors that contribute to youths' adjustment. With a follow-up rate of over 98%, the CLS continues today with participants now in early adulthood. To explore processes of intergenerational transmission, the focus has expanded to include not only the adult adjustment of the original participants but also the adjustment of their children. In 1994 Bob and Beverley published Lifelines and Risks: Pathways of Youth in Our Time which described the CLS and its implications for understanding the development and prevention of antisocial behavior. In 1996 the book received the Biennial Best Book award from the International Society for the Study of Aggression. In 1999 the Murray Center at Harvard University named the CLS a Landmark Study of the 20th Century. Throughout his career, Bob was concerned that the study of development was limited by disciplinary boundaries. Because development involves the coalesced contributions of factors both within and outside the individual, he believed that it was necessary to have a holistic science that integrated the different developmental disciplines. …

Effects of Parental Substance Abuse on Current Levels of Domestic Violence: A Possible Elaboration of Intergenerational Transmission Processes

Research conducted on the intergenerational transmission of domestic violence has framed much of its inquiry from within the context of social learning theory. Although consistently significant, the effect size of social learning-derived intergenerational transmission variables is often small. This study was undertaken in an effort to broaden the theoretical basis of intergenerational transmission of family violence by assessing if incorporating parental substance abuse variables with exposure to violence in family of origin would increase the predictive power of a multiple regression model. Subjects (N = 74) were men in treatment for domestic violence. Paternal substance abuse was found to exert effects on respondents' violent behavior comparable to those from exposure to family of origin violence. Findings supported a need to broaden theoretical views of the etiology of domestic violence perpetration.

History, Cultural Memory, and the Tasks of Translation in T. Obinkaram Echewa's I Saw the Sky Catch Fire

Across a range of disciplines and discourses, translation has become a central concern for many scholars working in the humanities. Indeed, the notion of translation has begun to inflect the most compelling and consequential debates on meaning and representation. My essay gives attention to Walter Benjamin's redemptive and generative notion of translation as survival and to postmodern currents in translation studies alongside a contemporary Nigerian diasporic novel written in English, I Saw the Sky Catch Fire. Framed by a passing on of the story of the Women's War (the Igbo women's tax revolt against the British in 1929), Echewa's narrative critiques the complicitous practices of translation, colonialism, and anthropology. In this exemplary instance of a type of hybrid postcolonial textuality, processes of intergenerational and intercultural transmission, conceived as both acts of translation and instruments of historical consciousness, perform as well as disrupt the work of cultural memory.