Life-course methodology

Sequence analysis, which allows studying life courses as meaningful units, has been increasingly used in both sociology and demography in recent years. Nonetheless, it has been exploited mainly as a descriptive tool for employment histories and, to a smaller extent, childberaring and residential mobility. In these applications, the challenge to compare and classify sequences for explanatory purposes has largely been bypassed by imposing a static perspective on sequence data and by focusing on how a set of individuals is distributed among states. This choice, in part, is due to the fact that in the social sciences there is little agreement about how we can compare sequences and “cluster” them through the tools of optimal matching (OM). In this paper, we expand the approach of Billari and Piccarreta (2005) to recurrent events for studying marital trajectories in five countries in sub-Saharan Africa.

In this communication I will aim to explore in a comparative perspective, between five age groups (18-26 year-old, 33-41 year-old, 48-56 year-old, 63-71 year-old and 78-86 year-old), and through the case study of Beijing the political consequences of the “youth bulge” in China.
Relying on answers I collected with an open-questions questionnaire in 2010 (N=627), I will point out in a comparative perspective between the five age groups which socio-historical events or changes are perceived as the most significant for the first two only-child generations. Then, I will discuss and put in perspective these findings with Gary Fuller and Jack A. Goldstone’s thesis which argues that countries moving from high to low fertility and mortality rates are more vulnerable to civil conflicts (Fuller, 1995, Goldstone, 1991, Urdal, 2006). To conclude I will argue that although the young Chinese may seem depoliticized because unlike their elders they mention very few political events, they however maintains a strong nationalist sentiment. I will also demonstrate that, as in the case of China, a “youth bulge” do not always leads to social instability.

N.B: I am sorry but I could not upload the figures coming with the long abstract (file to heavy).