Life-course methodology

Population studies strongly rely on survey data and much time is needed to prepare the data. Assigning comprehensible short and long labels renders outcome more directly usable, and producing a detailed summary informing about the distribution of the variables is essential for efficiently documenting the collected data. The Rsocialdata package is intended to help the demographer or analyst in this task, allowing him to focus more quickly on the analysis. The toolbox come in the form of a series of R packages. It accepts user-defined missing values and then allows to easily turn a missing value as a valid case and vice-versa. It natively account for weights when available and process automatic checks to prevent the loss of representativeness when filtering out cases with missing values for example. As all information is stored within the data object a method for generating a codebook is provided. Furthermore, the toolbox provides efficient methods for handling panel data organized in successive waves. For example by specifying '..' in place of the two year digits in the variable names, the user can extract a whole sequence in a single step, recode some values, or turn a missing value into a valid case directly for all waves where the variable exists. In this paper we introduce some key functionnalities of our toolbox.

What can say a qualitative longitudinal analysis about changes in the lives of workers, about the historical processes associated with them? To what extent is related the individual level of these narratives with social transformation processes? The aim of this paper will be showcase an exemplary study of Qualitative Longitudinal Research from the analysis of labour markets' insecurity and its ramifications for social uncertainty, based on interviews and ethnographic work, and aim to further codify principles that could guide this methodological innovation. To get this strategy, we focused on three methodological axes: life course perspective- trajectories analysis and cohort analysis. All these three developments (trajectories analysis, cohort analysis and life course perspective) are elements of a paradigm change in the social science toward the greater primacy of context, temporality, and process, in the studies of individuals, groups, and social organizations.

Many youth in Latin America lack clear occupational opportunities. This uncertainty in achievement a regular job may affect transitions to adulthood in terms of social roles related with age and stage of life course (involving prolonged education, frequent job changes, postponement of events, family dependence, etc.). The purpose of this paper is to ask weather increasing labor insecurity in local labor markets of Latin America have produced a fundamental shift in transitions to adulthood. The aim is to examine the relationship between job insecurity and transition to adulthood in Mexican women. We use data from a longitudinal study to examine how uncertainty in labor trajectories of young workers affects transitions of the life course. The applied method is Kaplan-Meier survival analysis for four events: First job (1), first protected job (2), first perceptions of insecurity (3) and transition to second job (4). Results suggest that youth with precarious labor trajectories handles a great heterogeneity of transitions to adulthood, supporting the view that labor insecurity heightens the individualization of life course.

Western populations are facing two major challenges today: The integration of the aging population and the increasing amount of immigrants into society. Indeed, this has never been as pertinent as today (e.g. Castles & Miller, 2009; Deutsche Bundesregierung, 2007). Given the current state of globalization with the emergence of new institutions and new forms of migration, the pressure on societies to deal with these unexpected changes is rising. For instance, the establishment of the European Union and the free boarders within it allows for increasing job mobility. As a result, not just the number of immigrants increases, but also the composition of all demographic cohorts, resulting in new consolidated minorities: elderly and race groups.
An increase in the number of minority groups can raise prejudice against them based on the majority’s fear of the increasing importance of the minority which in turn can lead to greater discrimination against the minorities (Becker, 1971).
This project aims at comparing different approaches to measure age and race discrimination in health care: Therefore 3 methods were used: a survey to measure the perceived age and race discrimination in medical treatment, a field experiment to compare the objective race and age discrimination and a lab experiment based on the game theory.

Among military officers higher rank associates with life expectancy. This may be causation: benefits of higher rank may cause life to last longer - or selection: robust health helps making it to top ranks. We investigate graduates of 1949, 1950, 1951 of the US Naval Academy (n=2206) and US Military Academy (n=1719), with 42%, 49%, 49% equally distributed survivors, focussing on men with 20+ years service, when men could retire with benefits.Variation in major intervening variables in this sample is minimal. Beyond the expected positive association between final rank and life span we find mortality differentials by rank peaking around age 75 then decreasing. This pattern supports selection hypothesis. Modelling unobserved heterogeneity by a frailty variable suggests that levelling off of differential mortality at higher ages is caused by differential loss rate by final rank. Trajectories to different final ranks and different lifespans start drifting apart early.

Brazil has experienced enormous religious changes in the past half century, primarily characterized by a sudden drop in the number of Catholics along with a major increase in the proportion of Protestants and people without any religious affiliation. The exact nature of these changes, however, is poorly understood from a demographic and sociological perspective. This paper examines changes in the proportion of religious affiliation (Mainline Protestants, Pentecostals, Neo-pentecostals, Catholics, and those without religion) across different birth cohorts that we built using individual-level data from several decennial Censuses of Brazil (1970-2010). Drawing on Hierarchical Age-Period-Cohort (HAPC) and Cross-Classified Random Effects models (CCREM), we examine the extent to which age, period, and cohort processes characterize religious changes in Brazilian society controlling for sex, education, level of urbanity, and geographic area.

As variation in the pattern of family life courses has increased over the past 50 years, the techniques available to analyse life course data have also expanded. While event history analysis is commonly applied, this is not always suitable, and more holistic approaches such as sequence analysis have been proposed as alternatives. As research tends to be interested in explaining more complexity in the family life course, it is necessary to extend our methodological toolkit by increasing the complexity of event history models (multistate event history models and simultaneous event history models) or applying other promising methods, such as sequence analysis and latent class growth models. The aim of this paper is to compare and contrast simultaneous event history models, multistate models, sequence analysis, and latent class growth curve models to studying the family life course. The advantages and weaknesses of each of these methods are highlighted by applying them to the same empirical problem. Using data from the first wave of the Norwegian Generations and Gender Survey from 2007/2008 for women in birth cohorts 1945-1954, 1955-1964, and 1965-1974, we model changes in partnership status across the life course, with education as the primary covariate of interest.

This paper is addressing the modelling of old age mortality and its
dependence of factors earlier in life. We argue for alternatives
to the widely used proportional hazards (PH) model, especially Cox
regression. There are several reasons for this. First, it is well known
that old age mortality very often is well described by the Gompertz
distribution. Second, accelerated failure time (AFT) models can be
expressed as linear models, which is important when interest lies in the analysis of mediating effects in the analysis of the impact of early-life factors on old-age mortality. Third, the results of an AFT model fit is easier and more intuitive to interpret in tems of years lost or gained,
compared to the PH model fit which reports relative risks. Fourth, contrary to "common knowledge", the family of Gompertz distributions is both a collection of PH families and a collection of AFT families, which we demonstrate in the paper. For instance, Kleinbaum and Klein (2005), in their text book on survival analysis, writes: "The Gompertz model is a parametric PH model but not an AFT model". This mistake is reiterated by other authors.

Event-history demography is concerned with statistical individuals, whose life courses can be inferred from empirical information. In contrast, agent-based models study simulated individuals, for whom certain behavioural rules are assumed. We wish to bring these two approaches closer together by proposing a method to analyse the rule-based outcomes statistically. We present a Semi-Artificial Model of Population (SAMP), which augments the Wedding Ring agent-based model of partnership formation by statistical data on natural population change in the United Kingdom. We utilise a Gaussian process emulator - a statistical model of the SAMP - to analyse the impact of selected parameters on two key model outputs: population size and share of agents with partners. Emulators permit a statistical analysis of model properties and help select plausible parameter values, despite the non-linearities and feedback loops present in agent-based models. A sensitivity analysis is also attempted, aiming to assess the relative importance of different parameters. The resulting multi-state model of population dynamics has an enhanced predictive capacity, but with some trade-offs between the outputs considered. The proposed methods allow for generating coherent, multi-level agent-based scenarios aligned with selected aspects of the demographic reality.

In comparison to older cohorts, younger men and women in the developed societies delay their transition to adulthood and follow more complex trajectories. However, within cohorts there remain variations in timing and sequencing of events. Two of the major determinants of life course events related to transition to adulthood, and in particular family formation, are gender and social class. These two characteristics can influence the sequence of events characterizing the transition to adulthood in terms of socioeconomic inequalities through a different availability of opportunities for social mobility. Several studies show that in North America, a higher familiar status tends to decrease the complexity of trajectories or, in other words, to push towards a more “traditional” pattern, i.e. a trajectory in which the end of education and the first job precedes union formation, which in turn precedes parenthood. On the other hand, it has been highlighted that in Europe the familiar status has a different effect with an increasing complexity among higher status.
The aim of the research is to examine in details the sequences of transitions highlighting, in a comparative perspective, how the life trajectories are influenced by parental social class and gender in the US and Italy.