Children's Opportunities and Constraints in European Parent Care Over Time: A Within-Family Approach.

The role of children's caregiving has received substantial attention in studies on care in old age. Previous research shows that children's care provision is strongly intertwined with both their individual and siblings' situation regarding employment and geographic parent-child distance. This study uses data from six waves of the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE), taking a within-family approach, to examine how caregiving is (re-)distributed between siblings over time. The provision of continuous parent care is observed more frequent and volatile in European countries with a family-based care system. The results from family fixed-effects regression models demonstrate that children working less than siblings persist in caregiving more. Living closest to parents facilitates children to keep up care efforts, while changing to living closest enhances the start of parent care. This study suggests that geographic distance is vital in the long-term organization of parent care between siblings.

Do birds of a feather leave the nest together? The role of sibling personality similarity in the transition to adulthood.

Empirical evidences on intragenerational transmission of life course have been demonstrated and that interpersonal similarity may moderate the effect. In particular, siblings who are more similar in their demographic characteristics are more likely to follow each other's life course transitions. Focusing on parental home-leaving and building upon the social influence processes and similarity-attraction effects, this study investigates whether the association between siblings' departures from the parental home increases when they are similar in the Big Five personality traits, like similarity in demographic traits. We use 28 waves of a longitudinal sample from "Understanding Society: The U.K. Household Longitudinal Study". The results of the multilevel discrete-time event-history analysis (N = 3,717 children) indicate that the association between leaving of a sibling and oneself was strengthened when they had a similar level of extraversion, particularly when they were both introverts. This implies that although introverted adolescents and emerging adults might take less initiative regarding social relationships and be more hesitant in their transition to adulthood, when a similarly introverted sibling makes such a transition, they are more inclined to do so. To conclude, the study uncovers the relationship between siblings' personality similarity and their resemblance in nest-leaving, which helps explain young adults' home-leaving decision in an era when delayed leaving is observed.

Marital-history differences in increased loneliness during the COVID-19 pandemic: A European study among older adults living alone.

The COVID-19 pandemic and related physical distancing measures have disproportionally affected older adults living alone due to their greater social isolation. Unlike previous studies on the subject, the current research recognizes the diversity amongst older adults living alone by considering the impact of marital history. Combining information from Wave 8 of the Survey of Health Ageing and Retirement (SHARE), with data of SHARELIFE and the SHARE Corona survey, we investigated the differential impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on loneliness in older men (N = 1504) and women (N = 4822) living alone. Logistic multilevel analyses were performed on data from 26 European countries and Israel. For men, we found that the short-term widowed were more likely to report increased loneliness than the medium- and long-term widowed and those living apart together (LAT). For women, the results indicated that the short- and medium-term widowed and the divorced were at greater risk for increased loneliness than those in a LAT relationship. Also, medium-term widowed women were more likely to report increased loneliness than their long-term widowed counterparts. The three hypothesized underlying mechanisms - i.e., (i) the opportunity mechanism, (ii) the expectation mechanism, and (iii) the vulnerability mechanism - only played a small role in explaining the observed differences. In sum, our study highlights the importance of recognizing the diversity within the group of older adults living alone when investigating the effects of the pandemic on loneliness, yet the mechanisms behind the stratifying role of marital history are not fully understood.

Nest leaver or home stayer? Sibling influence on parental home leaving in the United Kingdom.

Studies have suggested that the timing of leaving one's parental home can be influenced by a number of factors, such as gender, educational background, and parental characteristics. However, despite empirical evidence showing that siblings may influence one another's life course decisions, intragenerational effects on leaving home have not been adequately studied. In this study, we investigated the extent to which an event of a sibling leaving is associated with one's decision to leave the parental home and how demographic sibling characteristics may impact on the association. We also tested whether the number of siblings who left the parental home first is related to one's timing of leaving. Using data from "Understanding Society: The U.K. Household Longitudinal Study", we studied the process of leaving the parental home among 22,719 children and their siblings. The results indicated a positive relationship between leaving of a sibling and the own event of leaving. When siblings are brothers and have a small age gap, and when the nest-leaving sibling is older than the at-risk children, this relationship is even stronger. Finally, the more nest-leaving siblings one has, the less likely one is to stay at home. The findings provide evidence for cross-sibling effects on parental home leaving, underscoring the role of intragenerational associations with respect to life course events.

Should I stay or should I go? Explaining variation in nonstate actor advocacy over time in global governance.

The past decades have been characterized by a growing number of nonstate actors (NSAs) involved in global governance. However, despite this growth, only a small number of NSAs have been able to maintain a prolonged global presence over a substantial period of time. To explain why some NSAs are more active, we rely on resource dependence theory. We demonstrate that sustained advocacy over time can be explained by a density dependence mechanism, namely the more NSAs mobilize, the lower the chance that individual NSAs will prolong their global advocacy efforts. Analysis of data stemming from a unique data set of 5,627 NSAs active at the global climate conferences demonstrates that much advocacy in this field is indeed of an incidental nature, namely a large number of groups attend once and never return.

Educational differentials in cohabitors' marriage intentions at different childbearing stages in seven European countries.

Several studies have looked into the socio-economic gradients of cohabitation and non-marital fertility. According to the theory of the Second Demographic Transition, highly educated individuals can be considered as forerunners in the Western European spread of non-marital family forms after the 1970s. In Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), however, research has provided evidence for a Pattern of Disadvantage where those with the lowest education have been the most likely to adopt such family forms. Hitherto, few studies have considered the educational gradient of the intentions underlying these behaviors. This contribution uses information on marriage and fertility intentions from the Generations and Gender Surveys for seven European countries to assess educational differentials. In Western Europe we observe no strong educational gradients in marriage intentions at any childbearing stage (before, during or following). In CEE countries, however, less educated cohabitors more frequently choose for cohabitation during childbearing.