This paper analyses trajectories of life satisfaction among elderly people in various family situations and tests whether the disadvantage related to being single or childless increases (as predicted by cumulative (dis)advantage hypothesis) or reduces (consistently with age-as-leveler hypothesis) when people get older. The results show that the disadvantage of never married mothers grows with age, whereas the disadvantage of divorced people reduces with age. The study suggests that, in general, the increasing probability of ageing without close kin does not put at risk life satisfaction of elderly people.
This investigation examined whether the life satisfaction advantage of married over unmarried people decreased over the past 3 decades and whether the changes in contextual gender specialization explained this trend. Contextual gender specialization was defined as a country‐year‐specific share of married women who fully specialize in household work. The author used representative data from the World Values Survey–European Values Study integrated data set for 87 countries (N = 292,525) covering a period of 29 years (1981–2009). The results showed that the life satisfaction advantage of being married decreased over time among men but not among women. Furthermore, the decline of contextual gender specialization correlated with this trend in developed but not in developing countries. In developed countries the life satisfaction of unmarried people increased as the contextual gender specialization declined, whereas the life satisfaction of married people was not affected.
OBJECTIVE: Previous research has linked job insecurity to health deterioration. The risk accumulation model suggests that health effects of job insecurity may persist even after job security is restored, yet long-term empirical analyses are scarce. Our study evaluates the long-term effects of accumulated exposures to affective job insecurity on mental and physical health among the working-age population in Germany. METHOD: Using data from the German Socioeconomic Panel (12 624 individuals; 84 219 observations), we applied panel regression models with individual fixed effects to assess short- and long-term health changes associated with affective job insecurity. Job insecurity was measured by respondents' worries about job security. Mental and physical health was recorded with the SF-12 scale. RESULTS: Job insecurity correlated with short-term worsening in mental and physical health. However, after job insecurity ceased, health recovery was incomplete resulting in a long-term health deterioration. The long-term effects were larger among respondents who accumulated more instances of job insecurity, and showed a similar pattern for mental and physical health. An additional analysis documented stronger health effects of job insecurity among lower educated persons. CONCLUSION: Our study is one of the first to empirically demonstrate the negative long-term health effects of job insecurity. Our findings for a well-protected labor market like Germany's, suggest that the health risks associated with job insecurity may be substantial and potentially underestimated by studies that focus solely on short-term effects.
A century of scientific research on the family-health nexus notwithstanding, the last dec-ade has witnessed a renewed interest in elucidating the complex interplay of family, well-being and health. Several recent overview articles on the topic have appeared over the last decade, reflecting an attempt to sum up the main results from 'first-generation' research (Arránz Becker et al. 2017; Carr/Springer 2010; Carr et al. 2014; Hank/Steinbach 2018; Rapp/Klein 2015; Dolan et al. 2008; Hansen 2012) and to point to persistent gaps in the literature and directions for future research. We take this as an indication that we are witnessing the emergence of a 'second-generation' era of research that more closely follows the well-known tenets of life course theory (Mayer 2009), according to which individuals actively take age-graded, path-dependent life course decisions based on their available material and intangible resources within specific sociohistorical contexts. Consequently, recent studies are beginning to take a longitudinal perspective in a more rigorous manner (Arránz Becker et al. 2017) and are addressing issues of causality and social context ef-fects more carefully than before (Hank/Steinbach 2018).
A century of scientific research on the family-health nexus notwithstanding, the last dec-ade has witnessed a renewed interest in elucidating the complex interplay of family, well-being and health. Several recent overview articles on the topic have appeared over the last decade, reflecting an attempt to sum up the main results from 'first-generation' research (Arránz Becker et al. 2017; Carr/Springer 2010; Carr et al. 2014; Hank/Steinbach 2018; Rapp/Klein 2015; Dolan et al. 2008; Hansen 2012) and to point to persistent gaps in the literature and directions for future research. We take this as an indication that we are witnessing the emergence of a 'second-generation' era of research that more closely follows the well-known tenets of life course theory (Mayer 2009), according to which individuals actively take age-graded, path-dependent life course decisions based on their available material and intangible resources within specific sociohistorical contexts. Consequently, recent studies are beginning to take a longitudinal perspective in a more rigorous manner (Arránz Becker et al. 2017) and are addressing issues of causality and social context ef-fects more carefully than before (Hank/Steinbach 2018).
Our study is the first that aims at estimating the intra-individual effect of marital dissolution on mental health, conditional on parenthood status and age of the youngest biological child. We rely on the set point model that predicts a nonlinear, homeostatic self-regulation process with an anticipatory effect and a subsequent recovery phase. Assuming heterogeneous effects, we expect both parenthood status and age of the youngest biological child grouped into five distinct categories to moderate the strength of the dissolution-health nexus. We use GSOEP data and restrict our sample to women and men who were at risk for first marital dissolution within the observational period 2002 to 2016. The dependent variable is the mental health component of the SF-12 survey instrument. We estimate distributed fixed-effects (dummy impact functions), covering the time span from three (or more) years before marital dissolution up to six (or more) years afterwards. Compared to the baseline, childless women exhibit a considerable impairment in mental health after dissolution, experiencing a slower recovery than childless men. Our most unambiguous result is the negative anticipation and a subsequent downward trajectory of mental health among mothers of infants and toddlers, whereas in the respective group of fathers we do not observe any change over time. In all other parent groups, mental health reacts mostly in a short-term manner to dissolution, except for fathers of pre- and primary school children whose mental health remains unchanged. Our study provides new evidence on mental health dynamics around marital dissolution and raises the awareness of mental distress, loneliness and potential social exclusion faced by childless and parents, in particular by lone mothers of young children.
Our study is the first that aims at estimating the intra-individual effect of marital dissolution on mental health, conditional on parenthood status and age of the youngest biological child. We rely on the set point model that predicts a nonlinear, homeostatic self-regulation process with an anticipatory effect and a subsequent recovery phase. Assuming heterogeneous effects, we expect both parenthood status and age of the youngest biological child grouped into five distinct categories to moderate the strength of the dissolution-health nexus. We use GSOEP data and restrict our sample to women and men who were at risk for first marital dissolution within the observational period 2002 to 2016. The dependent variable is the mental health component of the SF-12 survey instrument. We estimate distributed fixed-effects (dummy impact functions), covering the time span from three (or more) years before marital dissolution up to six (or more) years afterwards. Compared to the baseline, childless women exhibit a considerable impairment in mental health after dissolution, experiencing a slower recovery than childless men. Our most unambiguous result is the negative anticipation and a subsequent downward trajectory of mental health among mothers of infants and toddlers, whereas in the respective group of fathers we do not observe any change over time. In all other parent groups, mental health reacts mostly in a short-term manner to dissolution, except for fathers of pre- and primary school children whose mental health remains unchanged. Our study provides new evidence on mental health dynamics around marital dissolution and raises the awareness of mental distress, loneliness and potential social exclusion faced by childless and parents, in particular by lone mothers of young children.
