New Voices in Iceland. Parents and Adult Children: juggling supports and choices in time and space

This paper deals with parents' perspectives and experiences of bringing up children with a variety of impairments in Iceland, and how they impact the young disabled adults' approach to the status of adulthood. The paper is based on a qualitative study that explored perspectives and experiences of 36 young disabled adults (16-24 years old), their parents, friends and teachers. The purpose of this paper is to share themes related to patterns of parents' reactions and choices when coming to terms with parenting a disabled child, the support they found from their social network and professionals, and their sons or daughters' subsequent views of themselves and their prospects as young adults. The paper includes different perspectives on adulthood and the extent to which the young disabled people expect to reach that status or remain as 'eternal youth' enmeshed in segregated services. Findings show that the type and nature of early support for parents of disabled children is critical for the young adults' approaching adulthood in regular society or expecting to remain in the limbo of 'eternal youth' within segregated settings. Early 'betrayals' may, however, be revisited at each subsequent transition point. Furthermore, parents and their disabled children who struggled for social inclusion could obtain full active membership in society, even against social and physical barriers, and medically defined disability labels.     

Grooming for Success? The Impact of Adolescent Society on Early Intergenerational Social Mobility

The attainment of initial status in adult society involves a series of transfers between distinct systems of adolescent stratification. The social and cultural resources of the childhood family may be converted into status within informal adolescent society and within the formal school system. In turn, family resources and status accrued during adolescence influence educational attainment and income in early adulthood. In this article, the outlines of these processes are specified in a structural model and tested in a nationally representative 12-year follow-up sample of high school sophomores in the United States. The findings in general support the validity of the model for White, Black, and Hispanic males and females.     

Anomie Among European Adolescents: Conceptual and Empirical Clarification of a Multilevel Sociological Concept1

Anomie is a complex, dynamic concept that refers simultaneously to a social state and an individual state of mind. Generations of sociologists have attempted to clarify, extend, and measure the concept at various levels of analysis. This article summarizes these developments around the twin concepts of exteriority and constraint. Exteriority refers to experiencing the social world as an objective, predictable reality, while constraint refers to the extent to which one experiences a personal commitment to the demands and expectations of society. The Anomie Scale of Exteriority and Constraint (ASEC) is presented and tested across various psychological and social outcomes among adolescents in 18 European countries. Exteriority is found to be primarily associated with more depression and less self‐esteem, while constraint is associated with a lower probability of daily smoking, illicit drug use, truancy, and suicide attempts. Societal anomie is higher in eastern European countries and it has a strong negative correlation with GDP per capita and a marginally positive correlation with GDP growth. Societal anomie is also associated with higher baseline levels of depression, self‐esteem, and illicit drug use. These results lend strong support to the theoretical construct of anomie as exteriority and constraint.     

Nonmarital Fertility and the Effects of Divorce Rates on Youth Suicide Rates

Using pooled, time‐series data for a sample of 15 developed nations, we assess the effect of divorce rates on gender‐specific suicide rates for youths aged 15 – 19 with models of relative cohort size, lagged nonmarital fertility, and an interaction term for divorce rates and nonmarital fertility. The results reveal that, for young men, relative cohort size is positively related to suicide rates, and divorce rates interact with lagged nonmarital fertility. The interaction effect indicates that increases in divorces are especially consequential for suicide cohorts of male youths who were born in periods of high nonmarital fertility. For female youths, only divorce rates exert a significant effect on suicide rates, and it is a positive, main effect.     

Gender differences in young adults’ inclination to sacrifice career opportunities in the future for family reasons: comparative study with university students from Nairobi,Madrid, and Reykjavik

This article addresses the question of to what extent young people show an inclination to accept some sacrifice in their career progression in the future in order to reach a better work–family balance. Data come from a survey conducted among a sample of 2383 university students who attended three universities: University of Nairobi, University of Iceland, and Complutense University of Madrid. After building a set of indicators about career and family involvement aspirations of respondents, and after conducting a statistical and regression analysis, this research shows that young women (on average) still have a greater predisposition than young men to make sacrifices in the future in their working careers in order to achieve a better work–family balance. Moreover, having a high degree of leadership aspirations and belonging to an egalitarian household tend to reduce the inclination to sacrifice career opportunities, whereas having a high inclination to be involved in childcare in the future and having the perception of a future work–family conflict tend to increase it. Gender attitudes have a differential effect on female and male students: having traditional gender attitudes tends to increase the inclination to sacrifice career opportunities in the case of female students and reduce it in the case of male students.     

Fisher Information for Two Gamma Frailty Bivariate Weibull Models

The asymptotic properties of frailty models for multivariate survival data are not well understood. To study this aspect, the Fisher information is derived in the standard bivariate gamma frailty model, where the survival distribution is of Weibull form conditional on the frailty. For comparison, the Fisher information is also derived in the bivariate gamma frailty model, where the marginal distribution is of Weibull form.     

Life Satisfaction Among Children in Different Family Structures: A Comparative Study of 36 Western Societies

This paper examines differences in life satisfaction among children in different family structures in 36 western, industrialised countries (n = 184 496). Children living with both biological parents reported higher levels of life satisfaction than children living with a single parent or parent–step‐parent. Children in joint physical custody reported significantly higher levels of life satisfaction than their counterparts in other types of non‐intact families. Controlling perceived family affluence, the difference between joint physical custody families and single mother or mother–stepfather families became non‐significant. Difficulties in communicating with parents were strongly associated with less life satisfaction but did not mediate the relation between family structure and life satisfaction. Children in the Nordic countries characterised by strong welfare systems reported significantly higher levels of life satisfaction in all living arrangements except in single father households. Differences in economic inequality between countries moderated the association between certain family structures, perceived family affluence and life satisfaction.