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AbstractThe following text is a brief commentary on Michael Ochsner's article "The Mis‐conceptualisation of Societal Impact: Why the Swiss Approach to Societal Impact is Productive and not Inexistent" in this special issue. It makes three points about the concept of social impact. The first point questions the appropriateness of the concept of social impact for assessing the value of research to society. The second point concerns the balance between creativity and research limits and between research freedom and responsibility to society. Finally, I look at the implications of information and communication technologies and artificial intelligence in assessing the value of research to society.

This open access book provides an overview of the ever-growing phenomenon of children in shared physical custody thereby providing legal, psychological, family sociological and demographical insights. It describes how, despite the long evolution of broken families, only the last decade has seen a radical shift in custody arrangements for children in divorced families and the gender revolution in parenting which is taking place. The chapters have a national or cross-national perspective and address topics like prevalence and types of shared physical custody, legal frames regulating custody arrangements, stability and changes in arrangements across the life course of children, socio‐economic, psychological, social well-being of various family members involved in different custody arrangements. With the book being an interdisciplinary collaboration, it is interesting read for social scientists in demography, sociology, psychology, law and policy makers with an interest family studies and custody arrangements.

Lone parenthood is an increasing reality in the 21st century, reinforced by the diffusion of divorce and separation. This volume provides a comprehensive portrait of lone parenthood at the beginning of the XXI century from a life course perspective. The contributions included in this volume examine the dynamics of lone parenthood in the life course and explore the trajectories of lone parents in terms of income, poverty, labour, market behaviour, wellbeing, and health. Throughout, comparative analyses of data from countries as France, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Germany, Belgium, Sweden, Switzerland, Hungary, and Australia help portray how lone parenthood varies between regions, cultures, generations, and institutional settings. The findings show that one-parent households are inhabited by a rather heterogeneous world of mothers and fathers facing different challenges. Readers will not only discover the demographics and diversity of lone parents, but also the variety of social representations and discourses about the changing phenomenon of lone parenthood. The book provides a mixture of qualitative and quantitative studies on lone parenthood. Using large scale and longitudinal panel and register data, the reader will gain insight in complex processes across time. More qualitative case studies on the other hand discuss the definition of lone parenthood, the public debate around it, and the social and subjective representations of lone parents themselves. This book aims at sociologists, demographers, psychologists, political scientists, family therapists, and policy makers who want to gain new insights into one of the most striking changes in family forms over the last 50 years. This book is open access under a CC BY License

We examined the relationship between lone mothers' repartnering and health in three welfare contexts: the dual-earner, market-oriented, and general family policy model. Drawing on the resources and crisis models, we applied mixture modelling for spell data of the Harmonized Histories data set. We uncovered six distinct repartnering trajectories that varied regarding the timing, type, and stability of higher order unions for different cohorts of lone mothers. Unstable repartnering was more frequent in market-oriented contexts, while contexts with more comprehensive family support fostered more stable repartnering. Although repartnering trajectories were overall not associated with health, these associations differed by welfare context. Mothers experiencing repartnering, though unstable, reported to enjoy better health if living in market-oriented contexts rather than in general or dual-earner contexts. Altogether, our findings suggest that even if higher financial needs in less-generous welfare may translate in more unstable repartnering histories, this seems to have positive spillover effects on mothers' health.

L'augmentation récente du taux de divorce et de séparation chez les personnes les plus défavorisées ainsi que la hausse du nombre d'enfants qui vivent en garde partagée soulèvent la question de savoir de quelle façon ces évolutions affectent les inégalités sociales entre les enfants. Cet article contribue au débat en examinant le rôle modérateur du milieu socioéconomique des parents dans la relation entre santé et bien-être des enfants, et modes de garde. À partir du volet espagnol de l'enquête Health Behaviour in School-aged Children, les différentes hypothèses d'effet compensatoire et plancher sont évaluées, en dissociant les effets de l'éducation et de la profession du père et de la mère sur la qualité de vie des enfants, notamment les affections psychologiques et la satisfaction de la vie. Les résultats montrent que les conséquences de grandir dans une famille dite « non intacte » sont plus importantes pour les enfants défavorisés, et que les inégalités sociales de santé et de bien-être après une séparation persistent dans l'Espagne contemporaine.

The recent concentration of divorce and separation among the least advantaged, and the increase in shared physical custody of children raises the question of how such family developments affect social inequalities among children. Our paper contributes to this debate by examining the moderating role of parental socioeconomic background in the relationship between children's health and well-being and child custody arrangements. From the Spanish 'Health Behaviour in School-aged Children' survey, we test the competing compensatory and floor effect hypotheses, distinguishing the separate effects of father's and mother's education and occupation on multiple children outcomes, such as psychological complaints and life satisfaction. Our results indicate that growing up in a "non-intact" family still has greater negative consequences for disadvantaged children, and that social inequalities in child health and well-being after separation persist in contemporary Spain.

The identification of lone-parent households is a challenging task in an era of new family forms and related changes in the legislation regulating parental care and financial responsibilities. Official statistics hardly reflect the composite reality of households between which children circulate and in which relationships with biological and non-biological parents change during the life course. On the basis of an explorative qualitative study in Switzerland, we focus on the blurry boundaries used to define the transition to lone parenthood. We analyse the life course of individuals whose entry into the lone-parent state fits one of these patterns: (a) becoming a lone parent despite beginning parenthood within a couple (separation, divorce, or widowhood); (b) becoming a lone parent coinciding with becoming a parent (contraceptive failure, partner refusal of parenthood, or lone parenthood as a life choice). We explore the way in which individuals describe their transition to lone parenthood and to which extent they identify themselves as lone parents. We conclude that such transitions are often non-linear processes and are often characterized by much ambivalence. They involve an array of heterogeneous and multidirectional transitions that are not always captured by current surveys, and we suggest how we could improve future measurements of the timing and occurrence of lone parenthood.

AbstractAccording to status-caste exchange theory, intermarriages involve transactions in which higher educated immigrants trade status for the ethnic advantage of the less-educated native partners. Looking at 2 836 currently married Swiss immigrants, we find that the highly skilled "exchange" their status only when pairing with a medium-educated native. Results also show that younger cohorts of immigrants are more likely to choose hypogamy when marrying a same-origin immigrant than when partnering a native.

In societies with strong multigenerational links, economic uncertainty results in choosing to stay with one child, sometimes in association with postponement of first births (i.e., Italy) and sometimes in early childbearing (i.e. Bulgaria). The differences in intergenerational family practices in lowest-low fertility contexts is likely to play a role on differences timing to parenthood. In this paper, we focus on the phenomenon of women who have or intend to have one child in their early twenties in Bulgaria and do not intend to have a second child. We argue that the key to this process is the persistence of extended multigenerational households in the Bulgarian context and their effect on young couples' fertility decision making. We use semi-structured interview data from the project Fertility Choices in Central and Eastern Europe and ethnographic fieldnotes. The interviews were collected from a sample of 22 couples resident in Sofia and representing different permutations of educational level, marital status and number of children (0 or 1). The ethnographic fieldwork was conducted in both rural and urban Bulgaria between 1997 and 2009 for a four-year period. Results suggest that as long as the economic situation remains dire, and young Bulgarians hopes for the future remain cynical, multigenerational households represent the accepted practice of entering into parenthood for young families.

Die Diskrepanz zwischen tatsächlicher und hypothetischer Fertilität (im Englischen auch unter dem Begriff Fertility Gap gebräuchlich) wurde in jüngerer Zeit zum Anlass für familienpolitische Maßnahmen genommen, um eine höhere Geburtenhäufigkeit zu erzielen. Dieser Beitrag untersucht die Relevanz einer anhand von Fertilitätsidealen und -absichten gemessenen hypothetischen Fertilität, mit der die Schätzung des Fertility Gap angestrebt wird. Ausgehend von einem Überblick der relevanten Literatur untersuchen wir die Bedeutung dieser Konzepte und deren Operationalisierung anhand empirischer Beobachtungen in drei Vergleichsländern: Österreich, Deutschland und der Schweiz. Wenngleich der Begriff des gesellschaftlichen Ideals der Fertilität mehrdeutig ist, kann er bei sorgfältiger Messung Aussagekraft in Bezug auf Reproduktionsentscheidungen bieten. Die Operationalisierung kurzfristiger und langfristiger Fertilitätsabsichten wird ebenso erörtert wie deren Realisierung. Analysen von Absichten sollten auf einem theoretischen Fundament gründen, etwa dem Miller-Pasta-Rahmen oder der sozialpsychologischen Theorie des geplanten Verhaltens. Letztere findet in Österreich und in Deutschland auf Grundlage von GGS-Daten Anwendung. Der Beitrag kommt zu dem Schluss, dass anhand des Fertility Gap mitunter falsche Schlüsse gezogen werden können, da sowohl der Indikator der tatsächlichen Fertilität als auch die Indikatoren der beabsichtigten Fertilität unpräzise sein können. Aufschlussreiche politisch relevante Informationen können aus einer spezifischen Form der Diskrepanz abgeleitet werden, wenn die Realisierung der individuellen kurzfristigen Absichten des Einzelnen betrachtet wird.

Die Diskrepanz zwischen tatsächlicher und hypothetischer Fertilität (im Englischen auch unter dem Begriff Fertility Gap gebräuchlich) wurde in jüngerer Zeit zum Anlass für familienpolitische Maßnahmen genommen, um eine höhere Geburtenhäufigkeit zu erzielen. Dieser Beitrag untersucht die Relevanz einer anhand von Fertilitätsidealen und -absichten gemessenen hypothetischen Fertilität, mit der die Schätzung des Fertility Gap angestrebt wird. Ausgehend von einem Überblick der relevanten Literatur untersuchen wir die Bedeutung dieser Konzepte und deren Operationalisierung anhand empirischer Beobachtungen in drei Vergleichsländern: Österreich, Deutschland und der Schweiz. Wenngleich der Begriff des gesellschaftlichen Ideals der Fertilität mehrdeutig ist, kann er bei sorgfältiger Messung Aussagekraft in Bezug auf Reproduktionsentscheidungen bieten. Die Operationalisierung kurzfristiger und langfristiger Fertilitätsabsichten wird ebenso erörtert wie deren Realisierung. Analysen von Absichten sollten auf einem theoretischen Fundament gründen, etwa dem Miller-Pasta-Rahmen oder der sozialpsychologischen Theorie des geplanten Verhaltens. Letztere findet in Österreich und in Deutschland auf Grundlage von GGS-Daten Anwendung. Der Beitrag kommt zu dem Schluss, dass anhand des Fertility Gap mitunter falsche Schlüsse gezogen werden können, da sowohl der Indikator der tatsächlichen Fertilität als auch die Indikatoren der beabsichtigten Fertilität unpräzise sein können. Aufschlussreiche politisch relevante Informationen können aus einer spezifischen Form der Diskrepanz abgeleitet werden, wenn die Realisierung der individuellen kurzfristigen Absichten des Einzelnen betrachtet wird. ; Recently the difference between actual and hypothetical fertility (fertility gap) has served as an indication to enforce family policies with the purpose to increase births. This paper examines the relevance of hypothetical fertility measured with fertility ideals and intentions, to the estimation of the gap. Based on a literature review we discuss the meaning of these concepts and their operationalisation with empirical observations in three German-speaking countries (Austria, Germany, and Switzerland). Although the concept of societal ideal fertility is ambiguous it can be useful for understanding reproductive decisions when measured scrupulously. Operationalisation of short-term and long-term fertility intentions is discussed, along with their realisation. Analyses of intentions should rest on a theoretical background, such as the Miller-Pasta framework and the socio-psychological theory of planned behaviour. The latter is implemented in Austria and Germany using GGS data. The paper concludes that the fertility gap can be misleading both because the indicator of actual fertility as well as indicators of intended fertility can be imprecise. Useful policy-relevant information can be received by a specific form of the gap, when realisation of individual short-term intentions is considered.