In Search of Waves: A Life Course Analysis of the Mobile Lifestyle of Finnish Surfer-travellers

Surfing is often a mobile lifestyle, centred around the search for waves. This article analyses Finnish surfer-travellers through a life course perspective. The data consists of 20 thematic life story interviews, conducted in 2016–2017. Surfer-travellers are representative of highly mobile cosmopolitan youth. This analysis focuses on how they have engaged with surf-travelling, what networks and capital they have utilized in doing so, and how their active agency and choices have influenced their lifestyles. Through their individual agency, surfer-travellers organize their lives to prioritize their travels. For surfer-travellers, mobility is a goal in itself, and this leads to a life ‘lived differently’. The results are connected to wider discussions on lifestyle mobilities, youth mobilities, mobile transitions, and changing conceptions of adulthood.

Enriching the HSN With Individual Causes of Death. A Database for a Life-Course Analysis of Victims and Survivors

The focus of this article is on how a newly created database on causes of death in Amsterdam (1854–1940) may offer innovative insights by combining it with the available information from the Historical Sample of the Netherlands (HSN). By doing so, it illustrates how future research can help to provide new perspectives on ongoing debates on historical and contemporary infectious diseases by combining information from several historical sources and databases.

Highly Skilled Migrant and Non-Migrant Women and Men: How Do Differences in Quality of Employment Arise?

Research shows that highly skilled migrant women often have poor quality jobs or no employment. This paper addresses two research gaps. First, it provides a comparative perspective that examines differences and commonalities in the quality of employment of four highly skilled groups: migrant- and non-migrant women and men. Four statistical indicators are examined to grasp these differences: employment rates, income, adequacy of paid work, and employment status. The results highlight the role of gender and country of birth: Swiss-born men experience the best employment quality, and foreign-born women the worst. Second, it offers a family perspective to study how the employment trajectories of skilled migrant women develop in time and place in relation to their partners’. The qualitative life-course analysis indicates that skill advancement is more favourable for migrant and non-migrant men than for migrant and non-migrant women. However, skill advancement for migrant women depends greatly on the strategies enacted by domestic partners about how to divide paid employment and family work, and where to live. The statistical study draws on recent data from Swiss labour market surveys. The life-course analysis focuses on 77 biographical interviews with tertiary-educated individuals. Participatory Minga workshops are used to validate the study results.

Statistic Canada’s Longitudinal Social Data Development Program (LSDDP)

IntroductionStatistics Canada has a long and reputable history of data linkage and an established Social Data Linkage Environment (SDLE). Under the agency’s modernization agenda the Longitudinal Social Data Development Program (LSDDP) exemplifies the agency’s efforts to position linkable administrative data as central in the field of social statistics. This is in response to the call for better longitudinal and intersectional social measures in an increasingly complex society. Objectives and ApproachThis presentation will include a detailed description of the LSDDP’s research and development activities which are centered on a linkable pseudonymised administrative data-first approach to social measures in the areas of longitudinal life-course analysis and intersectional social measures. The approach builds on existing activities flowing out of the Social Data Linkage Environment (SDLE), but with a more systematized, deliberate, and replicable approach; a set of analytical tools and processes. ResultsThe presentation will describe the following aspects of the LSDDP’s work: Responsible research and development under the principles of necessity and proportionality Data development and data structure Intersectional social indicators Methods and applied research in life-course analysis Conclusion / ImplicationsThe LSDDP presents a seismic opportunity responding to the need for holistic and multi-dimensional measurement of society that considers social progress and well-being as it relates to the interrelationships over time among social domains. In absence of longitudinal survey data such approach enables the staying upstream of social issues as well as the identification of intervention points for programs, policies, and other initiatives.

A Gendered Life Course Explanation of the Exit Decision in the Context of Household Dynamics

Using a gendered household analysis, we explore the extent to which operating a business upon a flexible basis at specific times in the life course impacts upon an entrepreneur’s exit from their business. Drawing upon UK data and a discrete-time event history model to conduct a life course analysis, we find women caring for young children are more likely to exit given limited returns related to incompatible demands between the time required to generate sufficient returns and caring demands. Limited returns however, were not significant to continuation rates if a male partner contributed a compensatory household income.

Introduction

Despite much emphasis on mental illness in later life, limited work has focused on mental health. This book aims to address this deficit by exploring, and explaining, mental health outcomes in later life through the lens of critical social gerontology and via the conduit of life course analysis. It adopts an approach underpinned by a commitment to understanding, and making visible, the role of lifecourse, and age related inequalities in creating or amplifying risks to mental health, as well as exploring those issues that afford protection. It aims to offer a critical review of existing discourse and disrupt the ‘taken for granted’ paradigm, including in the dementia arena. This approach not only recognises that mental health in later life is a complex multi-dimensional issue that cuts across time, cohort, social categories and individual experiences but that it is affected by a wide range of lifecourse and age related issues. It also encourages the development of understanding that adopts a wide lens of analysis and of policy and service related responses that reduce risks to mental health during the lifecourse and in later life itself. Further, it engages with the potential to learn from older people’s perspectives and lives.