Dynamic Family System Trajectories From Pregnancy to Child's First Year

Family systems reorganize during transitional periods, such as the birth of a new child. Longitudinal research, however, on family dynamics during the transition to parenthood is lacking. Accordingly, the authors aimed to identify family system trajectories from pregnancy to the child's first birthday and to examine their contextual predictors. Both parents (N = 702) reported autonomy and intimacy in marital (wife‐to‐husband, husband‐to‐wife) and parenting (mother‐to‐child, father‐to‐child) relations during pregnancy and at child's ages of 2 months and 12 months. Finite mixture modeling revealed 7 unique family system trajectories: (a) Cohesive (35%), (b) Disengaged (5%), (c) Enmeshed Declining (6%), (d) Enmeshed Quadratic (5%), (e) Authoritarian (14%), (f) Escalating Crisis (4%), and (g) Discrepant (15%) families. Parental education in interaction with duration of partnership and parity predicted family trajectory membership. The study demonstrates how different family types reorganize during the transition to parenthood; this includes decline, growth, and stability in autonomy and intimacy.     

Moving as a family affair: Applying the SOC model to older adults and their kinship networks

In cases where moves are voluntary, older adults may decide to move as a strategy to optimize their living experiences. Older adults may voluntarily move as a strategy to optimize their living experiences. We use the Baltes and Baltes (1990) model of selection, optimization with compensation (SOC) to understand the impact of moving on a family network. Extending the SOC model beyond individual analysis offers an innovative addition to the literature. Moving may serve to optimize one’s life by enriching one’s emotional and physical reserves, but relocation may also challenge the older adult and their kin with other demands and frustrations. While moving can be optimal in some ways, it is also important to consider how the act of moving may be exchanged for future emotional and instrumental support from spouses and kin. To complete this ethnographic project, the researcher conducted interviews, participant observation of the moving process (packing, garage sales, moving day, adjustment) and document review with older adults (n = 81), members of their kin network (n = 49) and supportive professionals (n = 46). This approach allowed for the possibility of tracking a network through the moving process, using formal interviews, participant observation and document review to find out if and how moving optimizes lives.     

Top girls navigating austere times: interrogating youth transitions since the ‘crisis’

Since the 1990s, young women in the West have been addressed as ‘Top Girls’, symbols of social progress and emblems of a new meritocracy. The 2008 financial crash and subsequent implementation of austerity measures have further called into question the realisation of such promise and potential as evidence suggests that the young and women have suffered disproportionately within the post-crash landscape in the UK and beyond. This paper draws on longitudinal data to interrogate the promises and failures of neoliberal and post-feminist articulations of aspiration and meritocracy as these are lived and negotiated by young women making transitions in the midst of the ‘crisis’. Attending to the biographical accounts of two participants occupying different class locations, I explore their transitions and perceptions of the uncertainties and risks characterising ‘austere times’. I demonstrate how, despite similarities in their experiences of a stunted graduate labour market, social class shaped how they responded to and made sense of the pressures and predicaments they encountered.     

A BAYESIAN SIMULATION APPROACH TO INFERENCE ON A MULTI‐STATE LATENT FACTOR INTENSITY MODEL

The influence of economic conditions on the movement of a variable between states (for example a change in credit rating from A to B) can be modelled using a multi‐state latent factor intensity framework. Estimation of this type of model is, however, not straightforward, as transition probabilities are involved and the model contains a few highly analytically intractable distributions. In this paper, a Bayesian approach is adopted to manage the distributions. The innovation in the sampling algorithm used to obtain the posterior distributions of the model parameters includes a particle filter step and a Metropolis–Hastings step within a Gibbs sampler. The feasibility and accuracy of the proposed sampling algorithm is supported with a few simulated examples. The paper contains an application concerning what caused 1049 firms to change their credit ratings over a span of ten years.     

Does a Perinatal Infant Mental Health Team Hold the Family in Mind? Opportunities and Challenges for Working Systemically in this Specialised Field

This paper considers whether systemic family therapy frameworks are used in current Perinatal Infant Mental Health (PIMH) practice. PIMH is a field that is, by nature, relational, focusing on enhancing the development of early parent–infant relationships. It is well accepted that the early years of an infant's life are crucial for brain development, and disturbances in early parent–infant relationships can impact negatively upon the child's development. Five clinicians from a PIMH service in a metropolitan area participated in a focus group related to key systemic concepts: genograms, family of origin, transitions, and morphogenesis. Findings suggest that the PIMH team does hold the family in mind, utilising systemic frameworks predominately in the engagement and assessment phase of intervention. They also highlight that PIMH clinicians focus on roles and boundaries occurring within the immediate and extended family unit and support families with the transition to family expansion phase. The application of working systemically differed significantly among participants, suggesting that the use of systemic frameworks in the PIMH field requires further exploration.     

Planning to work for free: building the graduate employability of planners through unpaid work

In the context of an increasingly precarious and competitive graduate labour market, exposure to pre-graduation professional work experience is becoming an increasingly critical feature of graduate employability. Outside the creative professions the contours of this shift have received comparatively little empirical attention. This study provides evidence of increasing participation in unpaid work beyond the creative industries where it is well established as a common practice. This study examines the complex patterns of opportunities and challenges that are created for and by Australian urban planning students in gaining relevant exposure to professional work, with a particular emphasis on participation in unpaid work experience. Through the lens of employability and the voices of early career professionals, this study explores the complexity of decisions to engage in unpaid work and identifies the potential personal and professional implications of these decisions. Focussing on the ways decisions around unpaid work are shaped by a range of factors including labour market conditions and disciplinary norms the findings yield new knowledge of how unpaid work is practised and shaped as a principal means through which employment-related advantage and enhanced employability in education to employment transitions is sought by participants and the potential implications of this.     

No Place Like Home: A Qualitative Investigation of Social Support and Its Effects on Recidivism

This study explores the relationship between social support and recidivism. Although the support system for the ex-felon has many beneficial aspects, it can do very little to counter the institutional barriers and deficiencies that exist with the present penal system. Recommendations are offered to enhance the transition from prison to public life.     

Incidence-based estimates of life expectancy of the healthy for the UK: coherence between transition probabilities and aggregate life-tables

Summary.  Will the UK's aging population be fit and independent, or suffer from greater chronic ill health? Life expectancy of healthy people represents the expected number of years of healthy well-being that a life-table cohort would experience if age-specific rates of mortality and disability prevailed throughout the cohort's lifetime. Robust estimation of this life expectancy is thus essential for examining whether additional years of life are spent in good health and whether life expectancy is increasing faster than the decline of rates of disability. The paper examines a means of generating estimates of life expectancy for people who are healthy and unhealthy for the UK that are consistent with exogenous population mortality data. The method takes population transition matrices and adjusts these in a statistically coherent way so as to render them consistent with aggregate life-tables.