Specific Life Course Research Articles

How loneliness increased among different age groups during COVID-19: a longitudinal analysis

The COVID-19 pandemic entailed restrictions that hampered face-to-face interactions and social gatherings. In this paper, we examine whether loneliness increased to different extents among age groups due to these restrictions, and if these differences were mediated by specific life course conditions. Based on longitudinal data from the Swiss Household Panel, our results show that loneliness increased disproportionately among younger individuals during the pandemic. This finding aligns with the social convoy model and the socioemotional selectivity theory, which postulate a decline of social network size over the life course. It also corresponds to findings indicating a decrease in contact frequency with increasing age. Individuals aged 30 years and above experienced a lower increase in loneliness when they lived in shared households; however, this protective effect was not observed for younger individuals. Living together with a partner, being male, and not anticipating health complications in case of a COVID-19 infection moderated the increases of loneliness, but they were independent of age.

Influencing Factors of Healthy Aging Risk Assessed Using Biomarkers: A Life Course Perspective.

Assessing individual risks of healthy aging using biomarkers and identifying associated factors have become important areas of research. In this study, we conducted a literature review of relevant publications between 2018 and 2023 in both Chinese and English databases. Previous studies have predominantly used single biomarkers, such as C-reactive protein, or focused on specific life course stages and factors such as socioeconomic status, mental health, educational levels, and unhealthy lifestyles. By summarizing the progress in this field, our study provides valuable insights and future directions for promoting healthy aging from a life course perspective.

Growing Up with Smartphones

Abstract Early migration scholarship on the transnational family has tended to portray stay-behind children as passive recipients of care and helpless victims of transnational migration. Despite the increasing sophistication of the literature highlighting children's active roles, empirical studies on transnational families focusing on understanding children's changing agency through time are still limited. We aim to fill this lacuna by offering a longitudinal perspective on children's changing agency in using communication technologies. Focusing on the “transition to adulthood” experiences of Filipino and Indonesian stay-behind children (from 9–11 years old to 17–19 years old), we examine how their agentic behavior and practices change in using information and communication technologies to negotiate power and autonomy within the transnational family. We show how the changes in the children's specific life course and the shifting digital divide that accompany these transitions shape the possibilities and limits to children's empowerment and agency in enacting family transnationally.

Occupation as a measure of life course socioeconomic position and the risk of oral cancers in India.

Evidence suggests that different indicators of socioeconomic position (SEP) contribute to oral cancer risk. Occupational status, as a measure of SEP, may be able to capture aspects of social hierarchy in societies in which employment is highly correlated with other social structures such as caste systems. Often in such societies, the life course of an individual is also influenced by this hierarchy. However, the influence of life course occupational status on the risk of oral cancer is not well understood. This study aims to identify the life course model that is best supported by the data using life course SEP-as represented by occupation-on oral cancer risk in a population in the South of India. Data from the HeNCe Life study, Indian site were used. Incident oral cancer cases (N=350) were recruited from two major referral hospitals in Kozhikode, Kerala, South India, from 2008 to 2012. Controls (N=371), frequency-matched by age (5 years) and sex were recruited from the outpatient clinics at the same hospitals as the cases. Life grid-based structured interviews collected information on an array of exposures throughout the life course of the participant. Occupation was coded with the 1988 International Standard Classification of Occupations, transformed to the simplified European Socioeconomic Classification, and further dichotomized into advantageous and disadvantageous SEP at three different life periods (childhood, early adulthood and late adulthood). The analysis was conducted using the Bayesian relevant life course exposure model with a Dirichlet noninformative prior and a weakly informative Cauchy prior to the overall lifetime effect and confounders. Participants in disadvantaged SEP throughout their life had 3.6 times higher risk of oral cancer than those in advantaged SEP (OR=3.6; 95% CrI=1.6-7.2), after adjusting for potential confounders. While the crude and sex- and age-adjusted models showed a clear childhood sensitive period for this risk, the model further adjusted for behavioural factors could not distinguish the specific life course period best explained by data. Occupation status alone could provide a similar overarching risk estimate for oral cancer to those obtained from more complex measures of SEP.

Life course trajectories of affective symptoms and their early life predictors.

Life course trajectories of affective symptoms (depression and anxiety) are heterogenous. However, few studies have investigated the role of early life risk factors in the development of these trajectories. The present study aimed to: (1) derive latent trajectories of affective symptoms over a period of more than 50 years (ages 13-69), and (2) examine early life risk factors for associations with specific life course trajectories of affective symptoms. Participants are from the MRC National Survey of Health and Development (NSHD) (n = 5,362). Affective symptoms were measured prospectively at ages 13, 15, 36, 43, 53, 60-64 and 69. A latent variable modelling framework was implemented to model longitudinal profiles of affective symptoms. Twenty-four prospectively measured early life predictors were tested for associations with different symptom profiles using multinomial logistic regression. Four life course profiles of affective symptoms were identified: (1) absence of symptoms (66.6% of the sample); (2) adolescent symptoms with good adult outcome (15.2%); (3) adult symptoms only (with no symptoms in adolescence and late life) (12.9%); (4) symptoms in adolescence and mid adulthood (5.2%). Of the 24 early life predictors observed, only four were associated with life course trajectories, with small effect sizes observed. People differ in their life course trajectories of anxiety and depression symptoms and that these differences are not largely influenced by early life factors tested in this study.

Leisure activities and cognitive impairment in old age: The role of life course socioeconomic status

Objectives: In the current literature on cognitive function, life course socioeconomic status (SES) and engaging in leisure activities are often viewed as parallel measures of cognitive reserve that independently affect cognitive impairment in old age. Some studies also suggest that leisure activity mediates the effect of SES on cognitive impairment. What is less examined is the modification effect of SES on the association between engaging in leisure activities and cognitive impairment, especially from a life course perspective. In this study, we focus on the interaction effects of specific measures of SES and leisure activities on cognitive impairment. Method: We use data from the Chinese Longitudinal Healthy Longevity Survey, which includes five waves of interviews with adults aged 65 and older between 2002 and 2014. Cognitive impairment is measured by the Chinese version of the Mini-Mental Status Examination. Childhood and adulthood SES and participation in seven leisure activities are included in this analysis. We adopt a lagged independent variable approach and the Generalized Linear Mixed Model to conduct the analysis. Results: Findings confirm that higher SES in both childhood and adulthood are associated with low levels of cognitive impairment in the older Chinese population. Furthermore, there are significant interaction effects between specific life course SES and leisure activities with a consistent pattern: Those of higher life course SES enjoy extra benefits from engaging in leisure activities. Conclusion: The findings point to a modification mechanism that connects life course SES, leisure activities, and cognitive health inequality among older adults.

Early life course processes leading to educational and economic attainment in young adulthood: Contributions of early socioeconomic adversity and education polygenic score.

The present study investigated an integrated life course model, drawn from the life course theoretical perspective, to elucidate youth’s additive, cascading, and cumulative life course processes stemming from early socioeconomic adversity and education polygenic score (education PGS) as well as potential interactions between them (GxE), which contribute to subsequent young adult socioeconomic outcomes. Additionally, the independent, varying associations among social and genetic predictors, life-stage specific educational outcomes (educational achievement in adolescence and educational attainment, in later stages), and young adult economic outcomes were examined. The study used prospective, longitudinal data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent and Adult Health (Add Health) with a sample of 5,728 youth of European ancestry. Early family socioeconomic adversity and individual education PGS were associated with life stage-specific educational outcomes through additive and cascading processes linked to young adults’ economic outcomes (personal earnings) through a cumulative process. A GxE moderation existed between individuals’ education PGS and early socioeconomic adversity at multiple life stages, explaining variation in adolescent educational outcomes. Both early socioeconomic adversity and education PGS were persistently associated with youth’s educational and economic outcomes throughout the early life course. In sum, the findings based on the integrated life course model showed how additive, cascading, and cumulative processes were related and conditioned one another, generating specific life course patterns and outcomes. The findings highlight the value of incorporating molecular genetic information into longitudinal developmental life course research and provide insight into malleable characteristics and appropriate timing for interventions addressing youth developmental characteristics.

Expectations for the Future Life of Floating People in Mega-Cities: A Study of In-Migrants in Beijing, China

This paper aims to contribute to the theorisation of the expectations for the future life (EFL) of floating people whose household registration books (hukou) are not registered locally in China’s mega-cities. Although the EFL of many rural-urban migrants is explicit, the EFL type of other floating cohorts such as educated migrants and the formation mechanism of EFL of floating people are much less well understood. We argue that EFL is a person’s pre-judgment or estimation of living conditions in the future based on his/her perception of current human well-being or utility of life and its main concern is whether he/she expects to live in the mega-city in the future. Based on the social production functions (SPF) theory, three types of EFL for floating population are identified by using data collected from in-depth interviews with 30 Beijing’s migrants. This paper reveals that the EFL of floating population is formed by comparing their current actual utility of life with the “normative utility” in the specific life course stage, which is the life utility that people should have in their specific life course stage expected by the society. Finally, these findings are checked out that the theoretical saturation has been reached by applying another 9 copies of transcripts of interviewees.

Socio-economic position at four time points across the life course and all-cause mortality: updated results from the Uppsala Birth Cohort Multigenerational Study

Socio-economic position (SEP) is associated with all-cause mortality across all stages of the life course; however, it is valuable to distinguish at what time periods SEP has the most influence on mortality. Our aim was to investigate whether the effect of SEP on all-cause mortality accumulates over the life course or if some periods of the life course are more important. Our study population were from the Uppsala Birth Cohort Multigenerational Study, born 1915–29 at Uppsala University Hospital, Sweden. We followed 3,951 men and 3,601 women who had SEP at birth available, during childhood (at age ten), in adulthood (ages 30–45) and in later life (ages 50–65) from 15 September 1980 until emigration, death or until 31 December 2010. We compared a set of nested Cox proportional regression models, each corresponding to a specific life course model (critical, sensitive and accumulation models), to a fully saturated model, to ascertain which model best describes the relationship between SEP and mortality. Analyses were stratified by gender. For both men and women the effect of SEP across the life course on all-cause mortality is best described by the sensitive period model, whereby being advantaged in later life (ages 50–65 years) provides the largest protective effect. However, the linear accumulation model also provided a good fit of the data for women suggesting that improvements in SEP at any stage of the life course corresponds to a decrease in all-cause mortality.

Au Pairs, Nannies and Babysitters: Paid Care as a Temporary Life Course Experience in Slovakia and in the UK

This article argues that intersectional analyses of care work also need to include a temporal aspect. Drawing on ethnographic research on Slovak au pairs working in the UK and on interviews with both providers and employers of paid childcare in Slovakia, I examine how the temporariness of care work is created within both migrant and non-migrant settings. In particular, I demonstrate that both employers and providers conceptualise paid childcare as a temporary period in their lives and show the consequences of this conceptualisation in their valuing of care work. In both examined cases, I focus on the role of care/welfare and migration regimes in the production of temporariness in care work and argue that both providers and employers of paid care construct their involvement in domestic work as a specific life course experience. While for au pairs, working stays in the UK represent a specific transition period from adolescence to adulthood, employers in Slovakia decide to employ particular types of domestic workers in relation to the particular developmental phases of their families and households.

Do birth cohorts make a difference for deficit accumulation trajectories in older age? First results from the KORA-Age study

Introduction Higher age is related to higher numbers of accumulated health deficits. However, to date it remains unclear how much of this association is due to age effects, how much is contributed by birth cohort effects and if a general trend of compression or expansion of morbidity can be assumed. The objective of this study was to investigate the role of cohort effects with regard to health deficit accumulation (DA) trajectories in people aged 65 and older. Methods Data originates from the baseline assessment of participants aged 65–71 years in 2008 (i.e. born 1937 to 1943) from the KORA (Cooperative Health Research in the Region of Augsburg)-Age study in Southern Germany as well as from an independent assessment in 2015 consisting of a younger birth cohort (aged 65–71 years in 2015, i.e. born 1944 to 1950). All participants were former participants of the population representative MONICA/KORA surveys conducted between 1984 and 2001. DA was measured with a Frailty Index (FI). This KORA-Age FI includes in total 33 items, covering 10 diseases, 13 measures of functioning and 10 signs and symptoms. All deficit items were coded as values between 0 (deficit absent) and 1 (deficit fully present). The FI for a person results as the number of the person-specific deficits divided by the total number of listed deficits. Thus, FI scores range from 0 (= no deficits present) to 1 (= all deficits present). If a participant scored missing on one or more of the deficit items, the denominator of the FI was reduced accordingly. Age-specific mean FI scores were graphically presented separately for the younger (born 1944 to 1950) and the older birth cohort (born 1937 to 1943), stratified by sex. The effects of birth cohort, age and sex (all coded as factor variables) on FI levels were analyzed using a generalized linear model (GLM) with the number of present health deficits as negative binomially distributed outcome and the number of possible health deficits as offset term. Significance level was set to 0.05. Results FI values were available for 1919 participants aged 65–71 years in 2008 (51% female) and for 1456 participants aged 65–71 years in 2015 (53% female). Participants from the younger birth cohort aged 65–71 years in 2015 had average FI values (FI = 0.141) comparable to participants from the older birth cohort aged 65–71 years in 2008 (FI = 0.136, P = 0.1071). Plotting birth cohort and sex-specific FI averages by age revealed that both birth cohorts started at the same FI levels, but thereafter, age-specific FI values were higher for the younger birth cohort and for women, specifically for those born in 1944 and 1945. These results were partly confirmed by the GLM. Higher age, especially for those aged 70 (RR: 1.23, KI [1.13; 1.34]) and those aged 71 years (RR: 1.23, KI [1.14; 1.34]) as compared to those aged 65 years, was associated with higher FI values. Also female sex (RR: 1.14, KI [1.09; 1.19]) was independently, significantly and positively associated with higher FI values. Having been born 1944–50 (RR: 1.04, KI [1.00; 1.09]) was positively associated with higher FI values, but the effect was not significant (P = 0.059926). Conclusion Based on our comparison of adults of the same age from different birth cohorts, an expansion of morbidity cannot fully be excluded. This seems to be largely due to the comparatively high levels of deficit accumulation for women born in 1944 and 1945, which coincides with the last years of World War II. Further research is warranted to investigate how specific life course experiences including deprivation in critical developmental periods for these cohorts may have contributed to these effects.

Does contextual unemployment matter for health status across the life course? A longitudinal multilevel study exploring the link between neighbourhood unemployment and functional somatic symptoms

This study examines whether neighbourhood unemployment is related to functional somatic symptoms, independently of the individual employment, across the life course and at four specific life course periods (age 16, 21, 30 and 42). Self-reported questioner data was used from a 26-year prospective Swedish cohort (n=1010) with complementary neighbourhood register data. A longitudinal and a set of age-specific cross-sectional hierarchal linear regressions was carried out. The results suggest that living in a neighbourhood with high unemployment has implications for residents’ level of functional somatic symptoms, regardless of their own unemployment across time, particularly at age 30.

Life events and moves under duress: disruption in the life course and mobility outcomes

There is a well-established body of research about the effect of life course changes on the probability of migration and mobility, and there is well-documented evidence of the link between specific life course events and tenure. Still, we have only a partial picture of what happens in the housing market when specific disruptive events impact families. This article reviews our broad understanding of life course triggering events and then examines just what happens when families move following a destabilising event (involuntary moves, loss of job, divorce and separation). Families can be variously affected by these disruptive events but the effects are greater for families at the margin, those who are renters, living in less advantaged neighbourhoods and with lower incomes. While these findings are not surprising, the size and likelihood of disruptive events is both larger than often reported, and increased during the housing crisis of 2006 to 2009.

From Noise to Signal: The Age and Social Patterning of Intra-Individual Variability in Late-Life Health.

Despite a long tradition of attending to issues of intra-individual variability in the gerontological literature, large-scale panel studies on late-life health disparities have primarily relied on average health trajectories, relegating intra-individual variability over time to random error terms, or "noise." This article reintegrates the systematic study of intra-individual variability back into standard growth curve modeling and investigates the age and social patterning of intra-individual variability in health trajectories. Using panel data from the Health and Retirement Study, we estimate multilevel growth curves of functional limitations and cognitive impairment and examine whether intra-individual variability in these two health outcomes varies by age, gender, race/ethnicity, and socioeconomic status, using level-1 residuals extracted from the adjusted growth curve models. For both outcomes, intra-individual variability increases with age. Racial/ethnic minorities and individuals with lower socioeconomic status tend to have greater intra-individual variability in health. Relying exclusively on average health trajectories may have masked important "signals" of life course health inequality. The findings contribute to scientific understanding of the source of heterogeneity in late-life health and highlight the need to further investigate specific life course mechanisms that generate the social patterning of intra-individual variability in health status.

The Welfare State and the Life Course: Examining the Interrelationship between Welfare Arrangements and Inequality Dynamics

The transformation of welfare state arrangements in European countries during the last two decades can not only be described as realizing an activating welfare state, but also as centred on specific life course transitions which are considered as critical. A number of new welfare arrangements have been set up or older ones have been modified taking into account the critical phases of the life course. These new welfare arrangements attribute new rights over resources to well-specified groups in terms of their life course events. The article first presents a selective overview of new welfare arrangements which are (in explicit or implicit ways) linked to specific phases and transitions of the life course in the different European countries; and, second, it analyzes the consequences of these new welfare arrangements on inequality. These arrangements establish (mostly implicitly) norms, which appear to define a role of an active, responsible and ‘able’ employee and citizen for everybody. However, the general starting positions of various groups of the population (such as women) and the existing welfare provisions constitute an obstacle to providing equal starting positions and an equal opportunity for pursuing one's life course according to the established norms. Therefore, the effects of these new welfare arrangements can have significant impacts on outcomes, and can therefore transform substantially the existing picture of inequalities.

Life course pathways to business start-up

We explore how socially embedded life courses of individuals within Britain affect the resources they have available and their capacity to apply those resources to start-up. We propose that there will be common pathways to entrepreneurship from privileged resource ownership and test our propositions by modelling a specific life course framework, based on class and gender. We operationalize our model employing 18 waves of the British Household Panel Survey and event history random effect logistic regression modelling. Our hypotheses receive broad support. Business start-up in Britain is primarily made from privileged class backgrounds that enable resource acquisition and are a means of reproducing or defending prosperity. The poor avoid entrepreneurship except when low household income threatens further downward mobility and entrepreneurship is a more attractive option. We find that gendered childcare responsibilities disrupt class-based pathways to entrepreneurship. We interpret the implications of this study for understanding entrepreneurship and society and suggest research directions.

Migration and retirement in the life course: an event history approach

Migration at older ages is commonly explained by reference to the search for greater amenity, and subsequently by the onset of greater dependency, but the links between mobility and specific life course transitions have rarely been articulated. We aim to establish the timing of migration in relation to retirement from the labour force, and to determine how its intensity varies around the retirement event. We also seek to identify how household and individual characteristics shape the propensity and timing of migration, differentiating moves according to distance and with particular attention to the characteristics of the spouse. Data are drawn from the first six waves of the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia survey, a nationally representative panel study covering the period 2001–2006. Migration events are identified relative to retirement and event history methods are employed to establish the characteristics predisposing households to relocate around retirement. Results demonstrate that retirement acts as a trigger to migration but the propensity to move falls as retirement age rises and the hazard is increasingly concentrated in the year retirement occurs. Within this framework the presence, health, education and retirement status of a spouse exert a significant influence on the likelihood of migration, though with different effects for long and short distance moves. Results highlight the importance of variations in underlying life-course trajectories in shaping retirement migration and demonstrate that only a minority of moves at ages 55–69 are directly associated with retirement, underlining the need for caution when identifying retirement migration using age as a proxy measure.

Geographical Mobility and Family Life: Comparing Generations from a Life Course Perspective

Geographical mobility is a well-established trend in European societies, and social theorists have put forward the hypothesis that mobility patterns have an impact on family trajectories and on their processes of pluralisation and individualisation. Using a life course perspective, the main aim of this article is to provide evidence of the impact of geographical mobility on family life in Portuguese society. The mobility and family trajectories of three different generations in their early adulthood are analysed, with results pointing to a diversity of trajectories as well as to relevant connections between mobility variables and family trajectories. The article draws on data from a national survey on life trajectories conducted in 2010 on a representative sample of men and women (n=1,500) from three generations (born between 1935 and 1940; 1950 and 1955; and 1970 and 1975; n=500 per generation). Based on sequence and cluster analyses, we were able to identify seven patterns of mobility trajectories and four main types of family trajectories across the three generations. These reflect not only the biographies of individuals within our sample, but also the geographical and family changes that have been taking place in Portugal over the past few decades. Drawing on multinomial regression analysis, the article seeks to disentangle the complex linkages between mobility and family trajectories. To this end, we adopted a double angle approach by linking these two variables as predictors of each other alongside other key socio-demographic variables and life course events. The main findings reveal that geographical mobility is a significant predictor of family trajectories, even if its effects are dualistic: Mobility may work as a facilitator of standardised family trajectories (early transition to parenthood, for example), but it also predicts a higher probability of “non-linear” family trajectories. On the other hand, family trajectories are weak predictors of mobility trajectories. The latter are predicted by variables that reflect structural constraints, such as unemployment, but gender and generation effects also play an important role and provide evidence that mobility trajectories are anchored in specific historic and social contexts. Finally, we were also able to link geographical mobility to individualisation processes by examining its impact upon specific life course events related to family and gender relations.

Measuring Women’s Cumulative Neighborhood Deprivation Exposure Using Longitudinally Linked Vital Records: A Method for Life Course MCH Research

A life course conceptual framework for MCH research demands new tools for understanding population health and measuring exposures. We propose a method for measuring population-based socio-environmental trajectories for women of reproductive age. We merged maternal longitudinally-linked births to Georgia-resident women from 1994 to 2007 with census economic and social measures using residential geocodes to create woman-centered socio-environmental trajectories. We calculated a woman's neighborhood deprivation index (NDI) at the time of each of her births and, from these, we calculated a cumulative NDI. We fit Loess curves to describe average life course NDI trajectories and binomial regression models to test specific life course theory hypotheses relating cumulative NDI to risk for preterm birth. Of the 1,815,944 total live births, we linked 1,000,437 live births to 413,048 unique women with two or more births. Record linkage had high specificity but relatively low sensitivity which appears non-differential with respect to maternal characteristics. Georgia women on average experienced upward mobility across the life course, although differences by race, early life neighborhood quality, and age at first birth produced differences in cumulative NDI. Adjusted binomial models found evidence for modification of the effect of history of prior preterm birth and advancing age on risk for preterm birth by cumulative NDI. The creation of trajectories from geocoded maternal longitudinally-linked vital records is one method to carry out life course MCH research. We discuss approaches for investigating the impact of truncation of the life course, selection bias from migration, and misclassification of cumulative exposure.

Globalisierung und die Veränderung sozialer Ungleichheiten in modernen Gesellschaften

This article deals with the effects of globalization on individual life courses and employment careers and the resulting changes in patterns of social inequality in modern societies. Empirically, we draw back to results from the international research project GLOBALIFE which studied the effects of globalization on modern life courses for the first time. The results show that the effects of globalization on individual life courses show marked differentiation with regards to specific life course phases: while especially the employment of mid-career men remained considerably stable under globalization, the careers of young adults, mid-career women as well as late-career workers underwent significant alterations. At the same time, results from the GLOABLIFE study indicate that the changes induced by globalization have not yet led to identical results at the national level. Globalization appears to be differentially filtered by deeply embedded and path-dependent national institutions. These “institutional packages” entail variable forms of labour market “flexibilisation” which themselves differentially shape patterns of social inequality in modern societies: While Scandinavian countries have largely succeeded in limiting an increase in social inequality under globalization through active public welfare engagement, globalization has led to a significant amplification of social inequalities in other regime types, either between labour market insiders and outsiders (in conservative and Southern European countries) or between individuals with different human capital resources (in liberal countries).