The Costs of Being “Different”: Sexual Identity and Subjective Wellbeing over the Life Course

AbstractInformed by the life course perspective, this paper investigates whether and how employment and family trajectories are jointly associated with subjective, relational and financial wellbeing later in life. We draw on data from the Swiss Household Panel which combines biographical retrospective information on work, partnership and childbearing trajectories with 19 annual waves containing a number of wellbeing indicators as well as detailed socio-demographic and social origin information. We use sequence analysis to identify the main family and work trajectories for men and women aged 20–50 years old. We use OLS regression models to assess the association between those trajectories and their interdependency with wellbeing. Results reveal a joint association between work and family trajectories and wellbeing at older age, even net of social origin and pre-trajectory resources. For women, but not for men, the association is also not fully explained by proximate (current family and work status) determinants of wellbeing. Women’s stable full-time employment combined with traditional family trajectories yields a subjective wellbeing premium, whereas childlessness and absence of a stable partnership over the life course is associated with lower levels of financial and subjective wellbeing after 50 especially in combination with a trajectory of weak labour market involvement. Relational wellbeing is not associated with employment trajectories, and only weakly linked to family trajectories among men.

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The increasing educational divide in the life course development of subjective wellbeing across cohorts

Acta Sociologica ◽

10.1177/00016993211055678 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 000169932110556

Author(s):

Alexander Patzina

Keyword(s):

Life Course ◽

Subjective Wellbeing ◽

Educational Inequality ◽

Growth Curve Models ◽

Health Satisfaction ◽

Highly Educated ◽

Middle Range ◽

Low Educated ◽

The Life Course ◽

Income Satisfaction

Labour market, health, and wellbeing research provide evidence of increasing educational inequality as individuals age, representing a pattern consistent with the mechanism of cumulative (dis)advantage. However, individual life courses are embedded in cohort contexts that might alter life course differentiation processes. Thus, this study analyses cohort variations in education-specific life course patterns of subjective wellbeing (i.e. life, health and income satisfaction). Drawing upon prior work and theoretical considerations from life course theories, this study expects to find increasing educational life course inequality in younger cohorts. The empirical analysis relies on German Socio-Economic Panel data (1984–2016, v33). The results obtained from cohort-averaged random effects growth curve models confirm the cumulative (dis)advantage mechanism for educational life course inequality in subjective wellbeing. Furthermore, the results reveal substantial cohort variation in life course inequality patterns: regarding life and income satisfaction, the results indicate that the cumulative (dis)advantage mechanism does not apply to the youngest cohorts (individuals born between 1970 and 1985) under study. In contrast, the health satisfaction results suggest that educational life course inequality follows the predictions of the cumulative (dis)advantage mechanism only for individuals born after 1959. While the life course trajectories of highly educated individuals change only slightly across cohorts, the subjective wellbeing trajectories of low-educated individuals start to decline at earlier life course stages in younger cohorts, leading to increasing life course inequality over time. Thus, the overall findings of this study contribute to our understanding of whether predictions derived from sociological middle range theories are universal across societal contexts.

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