Marital status and subjective well-being: A changing relationship?

It is well established in the literature that married people have a higher level of subjective well-being than the never married, widowed, or divorced/separated. However, previous research has yielded conflicting results on changes in the relationship between marital status and well-being. American happiness data in particular provide evidence of a declining relationship, whereas other studies suggest the opposite trend. The present study analyzes time trends in the relationship between marital status and two outcome measures, suicide rates and self-reported distress. The hypothesis that the relationship between marital status and these well-being indicators has declined during the last 10–20 years is clearly rejected. There is even some evidence that the relative position of never married men has become more unfavorable during this period. However, the causal interpretation of these trends is problematic.     

Spaces of Participation in Pre‐School: Arenas for Establishing Power Orders?

This article reports an ethnographic study of pre‐school children's social knowledge domains. Results show how the children's shared knowledge concerning social status and social differentiation in the group was strengthened and confirmed during a traditional teacher‐led ring game, where they were supposed to choose a friend. We suggest that from the perspective of the children, the game situation may be understood as, at the same time, a space of participation and an arena for establishing the power order. From the perspective of the teacher, pedagogical intentions may be challenged as they encounter and are mediated and interpreted by children's peer‐cultures.     

Statistical consulting

The paper and the special issue focus on the activity of statistical consulting and its varieties. This includes academic consulting, consulting to and in industry as well as statistics in public media.     

Leaving Home Early: Passing from Girlhood to Womanhood

This paper presents a case study of a young woman’s narrative of leaving home and her transition to adulthood. The case study is part of a larger research project about young women with an experience of an early break-up from home, through running away or being thrown out. Empirical material underlying this paper consists of a qualitative study of 12 young women that have been interviewed. The aim of the study is to understand how events like running away/being thrown out of home influences their transition to adulthood. The particular narrative demonstrates how a young woman presents and accounts for such a dramatic event as running away or being thrown out from home, and how that is understood in relation to her adulthood. A further aim is to illustrate how social services efforts are reflected in her narrative.     

Saving and consumption patterns of the elderly

The paper provides an empirical analysis of saving and consumption choices of the elderly in Germany, based on the German income and expenditure surveys 1978 and 1983. Main feature of these data is the large sample size making it possible to analyze saving and consumption patterns of the very old (aged 75 and above).The observed age-consumption profiles are very different from those predicted by the pure life-cycle theory. Although wealth is declining between age 60 and 70, it increases again after 70, such that the very old have the highest savings rates among all age groups and accumulate wealth rather than decumulate it. These profiles are not confounded by cohort effects and mortality differences. The corresponding expenditure data suggest the following explanation: due to the generous German pension system and the almost complete coverage of health expenses by the mandatory health insurance in Germany, the declining consumption n very old age cannot exhaust the annuity income of the elderly such that wealth is being accumulated in old age.Research in this paper was supported by the National Institute on Aging, grant no. 3 PO1 AG05842-01. I appreciate the helpful comments by Doug Bernheim, Angus Deaton, Daniel McFadden, Jonathan Skinner, Konrad 'Stahl and David Wise, and two anonymous referees. I am indebted to Hermann Buslei and Johannes Velling who provided most valuable and able assistance.     

The birth of the queen/the modern homosexual: historical explanations revisited

In this paper I review a number of explanations for the emergence of the modern homosexual category in Western (mainly Northwest European) cultures. I suggest there are four different emphases in respect of the social and cultural factors given priority in interpretations of the formation of the homosexual category. Of course, individual studies have often taken into consideration more than one single factor (most notably, Greenberg, 1988; Chauncey, 1994), and the grouping of previous studies that I here suggest only indicates where the focus of a given study is. The social and cultural factors emphasized in these four approaches are: 1) the effects of competitive capitalism on the bourgeois/middle class political economy of sexuality and sexual morals; 2) the rise of expert knowledges, controlling systems, and modern bureaucracies; 3) tensions within gender order and the struggle over new definitions of gender roles; 4) the rise of free wage labour, the proliferation of urban anonymity, and the unfolding of new modes of existence in the life-world of modern pluralist urban society. Finally, the article briefly considers the potential erosion of the homosexual vs. heterosexual divide in the light of the historical background. Almost thirty years have passed since ‘The Homosexual Role’, by Mary McIntosh (1968), the first notable contribution to the historical sociology of homosexuality operating within a social constructionist view of homosexuality. Since then, there have been numerous studies of the formation of the conceptual category and social aggregate of ‘modern homosexual’. Researchers have differed about whether the pedigree of ‘homosexual’ and homosexual identities and subcultures in Western societies can be traced back to the late nineteenth century or to the early eighteenth century, and whether or not some notion of ‘homosexual’ was established in the cultural imagery before the last fifty years or so. It might be fruitful to distinguish between the historically older categories of ‘molly’, ‘queen’, and ‘fairy’ on the one hand, and the more recent ‘homosexual’ on the other hand. It can be argued that the decisive feature of the first-mentioned ‘deviant men’ was their status as gender-crossers (which as a side-effect entailed an interest in homosexual conduct), whereas the modern term homosexual does not necessarily suggest gender-crossing or more generic ‘sexual inversion’(cf. Chauncey, 1994). However, allusions to gay men's purported effeminacy and lesbian women's purported masculinity continue to surface frequently also in contemporary culture. Hence, for the sake of brevity, I here use the term modern homosexual, by which I refer to a notion that there is in some people an inherent sexual desire exclusively for persons of the same sex, and that this so-called sexual orientation is to some degree intertwined with a tendency to gender-crossing conduct. ¹ 1 Historically there has been a mutually re-enforcing dynamics between the forma-tion of the conceptual category and the social aggregate of homosexual(s). Methodological considerations and also certain presumptions about the dynam-ics of culture and society help explain why, until recently, most studies have focused on the trajectory of concepts, identities, and social roles, rather than on the experiential, embodied aspects of the social aggregate of homosexual(s). The idea of sexual inversion predicates that homosexual desire is evidence of a faulty combination of body and soul: there is ‘a female soul in a male body’, or vice versa. On the distinctions between sexual orientation and sexual role see, King, 1984.