The Interplay Between the Early Work and Family Trajectories of Young Adult Women Born in West Germany: Differences by Parental Origins

Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP), this paper employs sequence analysis to identify “typical” early (observation window limited to ages 15 to 30) employment and family formation trajectories among female second-generation migrants in Germany. For the employment domain of the life course, four types of employment trajectories were identified according to their modal states: “long education,” “full-time employment,” “part-time employment,” and “non-employment.” For the family domain of the life course, three types of family trajectories were identified: “postponement of family formation,” “early family formation,” and “early single motherhood.” For the analysis on cluster affiliation, a multinomial logistic regression was used to investigate how parental origin relates to jointly determined employment and family trajectories. As expected, the descriptive results showed that trajectories of low labor market participation are highly related to trajectories of early family formation. The categorization by parental origins shows that there were few differences in the trajectories of most native and G2 women groups. One pattern that stood out was that compared to other origin groups, G2 women of Turkish parental origin were more likely to be on an early family formation path, and they were more likely to be on a path with multiple non-employment spells. In the modeling strategy, the remaining differences in the women’s patterns were partially explained by the differences in their socioeconomic backgrounds (compulsory school track and the father’s professional degree) and their maternal employment role models (the mother’s employment when the woman was age 15).

Carrying the Family in the Body: Family Trajectories of Paraguayan Women in the Paraná Tri-Border Area

This article discusses the results of ethnographic case studies on female cross-border experiences in the Paraná Tri-Border Area (between Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay) conducted in 2018 and 2019. Reclaiming the life histories of thirty Paraguayan women, we will analyze the tensions that lie between family trajectories, female transgenerational acquisition of cultural and social capitals, rural-urban and transborder mobility, and labor insertion. Our analysis will explore more in-depth the impact that productive and reproductive work overloads have on different generations of women who share family bonds, showing how their care responsibilities are intrinsically related to their agency strategies.

Genome-Wide Heritability Estimates for Family Life Course Complexity

Sequence analysis is an established method used to study the complexity of family life courses. Although individual and societal characteristics have been linked with the complexity of family trajectories, social scientists have neglected the potential role of genetic factors in explaining variation in family transitions and events across the life course. We estimate the genetic contribution to sequence complexity and a wide range of family demographic behaviors using genomic relatedness–based, restricted maximum likelihood models with data from the U.S. Health and Retirement Study. This innovative methodological approach allows us to provide the first estimates of the heritability of composite life course outcomes—that is, sequence complexity. We demonstrate that a number of family demographic indicators (e.g., the age at first birth and first marriage) are heritable and provide evidence that composite metrics can be influenced by genetic factors. For example, our results show that 11% of the total variation in the complexity of differentiated family sequences is attributable to genetic influences. Moreover, we test whether this genetic contribution varies by social environment as indexed by birth cohort over a period of rapid changes in family norms during the twentieth century. Interestingly, we find evidence that the complexity of fertility and differentiated family trajectories decreased across cohorts, but we find no evidence that the heritability of the complexity of partnership trajectories changed across cohorts. Therefore, our results do not substantiate claims that lower normative constraints on family demographic behavior increase the role of genes.

Intergenerational persistence of family formation trajectories among teenage-mothers and -fathers in Sweden

In this paper, we address the questions of whether early family trajectories of parents are reflected in childbearing teenagers, and how socio-economic and family background factors impact these intergenerational correlations. We use within-dyad sequence analysis to examine combined marital and childbearing trajectories, up to age 30, of two generations of a representative sample of childbearing teenagers born between 1975 and 1985 and their progenitors, drawn from the Swedish population register data. We find evidence for within-family persistence of early family trajectories, with better matches across family state sequences for dyads composed of childbearing teenagers and their parents, than for dyads composed of childbearing teenagers and parents of random birth cohort peers. Regression analysis shows that these intergenerational associations are stronger and occur among later-born siblings from non-traditional family backgrounds, and among families with lower socio-economic backgrounds. This study fills gaps in the knowledge of intergenerational family life course dynamics beyond the early parenthood event.

Joint Family and Work Trajectories and Multidimensional Wellbeing

Informed 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.