Across Europe grandparents play very different roles. This paper studies to what extent grandparents' role as providers of child care relates to the country policy context, focusing on public ...child-care services and parental leave regulation, and to the availability of part-time jobs for women. We also explore whether mothers' needs to combine family and work differently influence the frequency of grandparental child care across countries. The analysis combines micro-data from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe and macro-indicators from the Multilinks database and Eurostat. We find a clear association between policy context and frequency of grandparental child care. Three models emerge. In countries close to the familialism by default model (i.e. characterized by scarce public child-care services and parental leave), when grandparents provide child care they often do it daily. In countries characterized by defamilialization and supported familialism policies (with generous public services and parental leave) grandparents take on a marginal role. An intermediate model emerges in countries characterized by a limited offer of child care or parental leave, where grandparental child care complements state support and tends to be offered on a weekly basis. Our analysis corroborates the idea that the highly intensive involvement of grandparents in countries with low availability of part-time jobs for women is influenced by the need (unmet by the welfare) of mothers to combine work and family.
This study examines gender inequalities in the degree of engagement in social clubs of older people and how women’s participation relates to their empowerment at the country level. Combined ...individual-level data from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) and country-level data from the Women’s Political Empowerment Index (WPEI) are used in analyzing 41,185 non-working individuals aged 65–84 across 19 countries. Multilevel regression analyses are conducted to address these aims. We detect notable between-country variations in levels of participation. Substantial differences in the WPEI reflect marked contextual cross-country differences in gender equality. In roughly half of the 19 countries, no gender differences in social club participation are detected; however, women are more likely to participate in social clubs in the more gender-egalitarian countries of France, Denmark, Luxembourg and the Netherlands, whereas in three countries – Italy, Czech Republic and Croatia – more men than women participate in social clubs. Cross-country gender differences in social club participation point to the importance of cultural factors in influencing opportunities for active ageing.
Policies aiming at reducing rates of hospitalization and death from coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) encouraged older people to reduce physical interactions. In England, until July 2021, provision ...of care for grandchildren was allowed only under very limited circumstances. Evidence also suggests that reduced face-to-face interactions took a toll on mental health during the pandemic. This study aims to investigate associations between changes in grandchild care provision during the first 8/9 months of the pandemic and grandparents' mental health.
Using prepandemic data from Wave 9 (2018/2019) and the second COVID-19 substudy (November/December 2020) of the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing, we first describe changes in grandchild care provision during the pandemic to then investigate, using regression models, associations between changes in grandchild care provision and mental health (depression, quality of life, life satisfaction), while controlling for prepandemic levels of the outcome variables.
About 10% of grandparents stopped looking after grandchildren altogether during the first 9 months of the pandemic, with 22% reporting an overall decrease in the amount of grandchild care provided. Compared to grandparents who mostly maintained unchanged their grandchild care provision, those who stopped altogether and those who mostly reduced the amount of grandchild care provided were more likely to report poorer mental health, even accounting for prepandemic health.
While measures to limit physical contact and shield older people were necessary to reduce the spread of COVID-19, policymakers should acknowledge potential adverse consequences for mental health among grandparents who experienced changes in their roles as grandchild caregivers.
Split-ballot data are often used to study double standards. The key problem of this design is that individual double standards cannot be identified. I propose a simple two-step approach based on a ...matching pre-processing of the data to estimate individual double standards. Once this preliminary first step is completed, any statistical technique (e.g., regression models) can be applied on the new data. I apply the method to gender double standards on attitudes toward the age one leaves home by using data from the third round of the European Social Survey. The proposed method simplifies regression analyses of the effects of covariates on double standards and offers new opportunities for research on double standards.
Abstract Social scientists have long been interested in how attitudes and values influence fertility intentions and behaviors. The role of political ideology has, on the contrary, been overlooked. ...Right-wing people tend to be more religious, to hold more traditional views on gender roles and on the importance of the family. Therefore, right-wing people may be more likely to hold positive fertility intentions that individuals with other political orientations. In addition, political ideology may have an effect on fertility intention independent of other attitudes. Using two rounds of the European Social Survey, we show that people that position at the extreme right of the political ideology scale are more likely to intend to have a child during the three years following the interview. This association holds even after accounting for several socio-demographic and economic factors, values and attitudes. Heterogeneity tests show that the association is restricted to younger individuals (aged 20–34), with higher levels of education (at least upper secondary), and individuals in Eastern Europe. In Southern Europe right-wing individuals show significantly higher predicted probabilities of a positive fertility intention compared people that locate themselves in the political center. The statistically significant associations are also sizeable (differences in terms of predicted probabilities vary between 4 and 9 percentage points). These results point to the importance of considering a neglected factor in fertility research and contribute to the growing field of Political Demography.
Drawing on the revived literature on the subjective dimension of ageing, this paper investigates whether people aged 65+, usually defined as old, do actually feel old and which events they associate ...with feeling old. Logistic models are used on unique data from the 2013 survey called ‘I Do Not Want to Be Inactive’, conducted on individuals aged 65–74 in Italy (N = 828). It is found that a large proportion of respondents do not feel old at all. The analyses show that women are more likely than men to feel old and to think that society considers them old. While men feel old mainly when they retire, women associate this feeling with loneliness, loss of independence and death of loved ones. Higher-educated people are less likely to associate feeling old with loneliness and boredom than their lower-educated counterparts. The findings have important implications for the conceptualisation of ageing. Most people who are old according to the standard threshold of 65 do not consider reaching this age as a distinctive marker of old age in their lifecourse. This suggests that absolute thresholds for setting the start of old age are questionable. Feeling old seems to be mainly influenced by events, such as retirement and death of loved ones, hinting to the importance of the social construction of ageing in addition to its biological dimension. Researchers and policy makers are encouraged to give more attention to layperson views on ageing.
REPLY TO DOWD ET AL Arpino, Bruno; Bordone, Valeria; Pasqualini, Marta
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences - PNAS,
10/2020, Volume:
117, Issue:
42
Journal Article
This study investigates the impact of non-intensive and intensive supplementary grandparental child care on grandparents’ involvement in leisure activities. Three aspects of leisure activities are ...investigated: the number/frequency of activities, with whom they are carried out and the subjective satisfaction with them. Beside the possibility of a cumulation effect, the literature suggests that providing grandparental child care might compete with other activities, especially for women. Thus, we consider role enhancement and role strain theories to derive our hypotheses. We use longitudinal data from the German Ageing Survey (DEAS) which contains rich information on the leisure activities of people aged 40 and older. To account for selection into the provision of grandparental child care, we use a within-unit estimation approach (fixed-effects panel models). Our results show that both grandfathers and grandmothers tend to engage in more leisure activities when they provide grandparental child care. While care-giving grandfathers become more likely to engage in activities with family members without changing their engagement outside the family, we found no effect for women in this respect. Nevertheless, grandparental child-care provision modifies satisfaction with leisure activities only for women, reducing it, independently from with whom leisure activities are carried out. These findings suggest that a higher quantity of leisure activities does not necessarily imply higher quality.
The life course approach emphasizes that health and wellbeing at older ages are influenced by experiences occurred in the previous stages of life. We contribute to the literature by focusing on the ...role of the non-standardness of family histories and argue that individuals who experienced non-standard trajectories have been exposed to social sanctions throughout their life course with negative long-term consequences on wellbeing. In our study, non-standardness of family histories is the extent an individual's family history differs from those of the others within reference groups, defined combining birth cohort, gender and country of residence. Family histories between age of 15 and 49 are analyzed using Sequence Analysis, thus accounting for events related to fertility and union formation (marriage and cohabitation) and dissolution, and their timing. Dissimilarities between family sequences are measured using optimal matching and are standardized within the reference groups. We use retrospective data from the seventh wave of the Survey of Health Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) and estimate linear regression models to assess the association between non-standardness of family histories and older people's life satisfaction. Quality of life and depressive symptoms are examined in additional analyses. A negative association is found between non-standardness of family histories and wellbeing, which is stronger for lower educated individuals and in Southern European countries. Results are consistent with the idea that uncommon family behaviors may have a long-term negative effect on wellbeing. Individual resources and a more tolerant societal context can reduce or eliminate the negative consequences of engaging in non-standard family behaviors.
We consider policy evaluations when the Stable Unit Treatment Value Assumption (SUTVA) is violated due to the presence of interference among units. We propose to explicitly model interference as a ...function of units' characteristics. Our approach is applied to the evaluation of a policy implemented in Tuscany (a region in Italy) on small handicraft firms. Results show that the benefits from the policy are reduced when treated firms are subject to high levels of interference. Moreover, the average causal effect is slightly underestimated when interference is ignored. We stress the importance of considering possible interference among units when evaluating and planning policy interventions.
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