The limited effect of increasing educational attainment on childlessness trends in twentieth-century Europe,women born 1916–65

During the twentieth century, trends in childlessness varied strongly across European countries while educational attainment grew continuously across them. Using census and large-scale survey data from 13 European countries, we investigated the relationship between these two factors among women born between 1916 and 1965. Up to the 1940 birth cohort, the share of women childless at age 40+ decreased universally. Afterwards, the trends diverged across countries. The results suggest that the overall trends were related mainly to changing rates of childlessness within educational groups and only marginally to changes in the educational composition of the population. Over time, childlessness levels of the medium-educated and high-educated became closer to those of the low-educated, but the difference in level between the two better educated groups remained stable in Western and Southern Europe and increased slightly in the East.     

A Comparative Study of Segregation Patterns in Belgium,Denmark, the Netherlands and Sweden: Neighbourhood Concentration and Representation of Non-European Migrants

In this paper, we use geo-coded, individual-level register data on four European countries to compute comparative measures of segregation that are independent of existing geographical sub-divisions. The focus is on non-European migrants, for whom aggregates of egocentric neighbourhoods (with different population counts) are used to assess small-scale, medium-scale, and large-scale segregation patterns. At the smallest scale level, corresponding to neighbourhoods with 200 persons, patterns of over- and under-representation are strikingly similar. At larger-scale levels, Belgium stands out as having relatively strong over- and under-representation. More than 55% of the Belgian population lives in large-scale neighbourhoods with moderate under- or over-representation of non-European migrants. In the other countries, the corresponding figures are between 30 and 40%. Possible explanations for the variation across countries are differences in housing policies and refugee placement policies. Sweden has the largest and Denmark the smallest non-European migrant population, in relative terms. Thus, in both migrant-dense and native-born-dense areas, Swedish neighbourhoods have a higher concentration and Denmark a lower concentration of non-European migrants than the other countries. For large-scale, migrant-dense neighbourhoods, however, levels of concentration are similar in Belgium, the Netherlands, and Sweden. Thus, to the extent that such concentrations contribute to spatial inequalities, these countries are facing similar policy challenges.     

Récession,austérité et genre: étude comparative sur huit marchés du travail européens

Si l'effondrement du PIB consécutif à la crise économique mondiale de 2008 a nui avant tout à l'emploi des hommes, les politiques d'austérité auraient davantage affecté celui des femmes. L'auteure cherche à vérifier ce scénario dans huit pays européens, en décomposant la variation trimestrielle du taux d'activité et du taux d'emploi des femmes et des hommes à l'échelon sectoriel. Elle montre que l'association entre he‐cession et she‐austerity ne se confirme pas toujours, mais que les politiques d'austérité peuvent nuire à l'égalité des sexes et aux droits de la femme par d'autres mécanismes d'action, qu'elle répertorie et commente.     

Dyadic Cross-Sectional Associations Between Depressive Mood,Relationship Satisfaction,and Common Dyadic Coping

The aim of this cross-sectional study was to investigate the mediational role of common dyadic coping in the links between depressive mood and relationship satisfaction. We estimated two competing Actor–Partner Mediator Models, in which the dyad is the highest unit of analysis. The first model specified dyadic coping as a mediator in the association between relationship satisfaction and depression, whereas the second model specified dyadic coping as a mediator between depression and relationship satisfaction. Analyzing data from 198 couples, our findings provided a plausible approximation of the second model, representing the interactional model of depression. They showed that common dyadic coping mediates the link between depression and relationship satisfaction for men only.     

Wages and employment of French workers with African origin

Our study focuses on the differences in wages and employment between French workers with French parents and French workers with at least one African parent, using the Formation Qualification Professionnelle survey (Insee, Paris, 2003). We introduce econometric decompositions, which allow us to reach conclusions when the potentially discriminated group is small. Then, we clarify the impact of discrimination at the hiring level in this context. We find that unexplained parts in the employment decompositions are much larger than in the wage decompositions. This suggests that, in France, labor market discrimination is more frequent at the hiring level than in the compensation process.     

Childcare costs and the demand for children—evidence from a nationwide reform

Exploiting the exogenous variation in user fees caused by a Swedish childcare reform, we are able to identify the causal effect of childcare costs on fertility in a context in which childcare enrollment is almost universal, user fees are low, and labor force participation of mothers is very high. Anticipation of a reduction in childcare costs increased the number of first and higher-order births, but only seemed to affect the timing of second births. For families with many children we also find a marginally significant negative income effect on fertility.     

Patterns of Informal Help and Caregiving in Sweden: A Thirteen-Year Perspective

This article analyses informal help and caregiving in Sweden with a focus on the scope and trends of change over time. The discussion is based on the results of three national surveys and of one survey conducted in the county of Stockholm. The results indicated that informal help and caregiving was common throughout the period under study. In the 1990s, the figures were fairly stable, while from the late 1990s to 2005 there seems to have been a dramatic increase in the prevalence of such support. Two interpretative perspectives are used to discuss this pattern. One locates its point of departure in recent welfare state changes and in the substitution argument, according to which cuts in welfare services put more pressure on people to provide informal help and care. The second perspective relates to the present debate on civil society and to its possible role in contemporary society. According to the civil society perspective, an increase in the prevalence of informal help and caregiving might be interpreted as an expression of growing civic involvement 'in its own right', without a straightforward and simple relationship to changes in the welfare state. It is argued in the article that the two frames of interpretation should not be viewed as mutually exclusive, but rather that they represent two partly complementary approaches to the understanding of the complex dynamics of unpaid work in contemporary Swedish society.     

Links between informal caregiving and volunteering in Sweden: a 17-year perspective

This article analyses informal caregiving and volunteering in organizations over 17 years in Sweden, with a focus on links between these two forms of unpaid activities. The discussion is based on results from a national survey that was repeated four times in the period 1992–2009. Links were found between the different types of activities. In all four studies a substantial group of the population was involved both in informal caregiving and volunteering. This group of ‘active citizens’ are commonly also engaged in informal social networks. This ‘double active’ group had increased over time and they provide a substantial amount of hours of involvement. Patterns outlined in this article demonstrate that unpaid activities represent a multifaceted phenomenon, and that the boundaries between informal caregiving and volunteering as forms of engagement may be more fluid than has previously been acknowledged. The results challenge the literature in which informal caregiving is viewed as a major obstacle to volunteering. At the same time, however, informal caregiving in general was found to be increasing. There might be reasons to be cautious about the possible risk that too much pressure on citizens for informal caregiving might jeopardize the type of double involvement that is outlined in this article.     

Professional stances and personal values in the realm of transnational family reunification with older parents: social work practice in an emerging field

National rules for family reunification take place in an increasingly transnational context. Social workers in Switzerland, whether they work in services for migrants or for elders, are confronted with requests for transnational family reunification with older parents. Such requests, while relatively rare, elicit responses which must be viewed as largely founded on professionals' values and norms regarding the care of elders, family cohabitation, the influence of cultural factors, and examined against a backdrop of increasing suspicion of motives for migration—especially in fields where migration issues have not been at the forefront of professional debate and practice. The militant stance of some services for migrants can thus be contrasted with the relative inexperience of professionals active in social services for elders, who rarely encounter recent migrants. The latter are more likely to reflect their own private—and unexamined—views when advising clients in a field characterised by complexity and instability. The authors interviewed social workers and families in two Swiss cantons. Their results point to ways in which distinct professional cultures could enrich each other and provide social workers with tools to critically analyse their own practice in a very difficult field, the contours of which remain largely unexplored.     

Reduced Risk-Taking After Prior Losses in Pathological Gamblers Under Treatment and Healthy Control Group but not in Problem Gamblers

A group of pathological gamblers and a group of problem gamblers (i.e., gamblers at risk of becoming pathological) were compared to healthy controls on their risk-taking propensity after prior losses. Each participant played both the Balloon Analogue Risk Taking task (BART) and a modified version of the same task, where individuals face five repeated predetermined early losses at the onset of the game. No significant difference in risk-taking was found between groups on the standard BART task, while significant differences emerged when comparing behaviors in the two tasks: both pathological gamblers and controls reduced their risk-taking tendency after prior losses in the modified BART compared to the standard BART, whereas problem gamblers showed no reduction in risk-taking after prior losses. We interpret these results as a sign of a reduced sensitivity to negative feedback in problem gamblers which might contribute to explain their loss-chasing tendency.