Family relationships have been an important object of scholarly interest in the field of migration studies, notably in the case of labour migration. The impact of this migration phenomenon on family relationships has been investigated from different angles. Studies have shown how migration reconfigures gender relations at home, puts into question normative conceptions about the family and modifies intimacy in the parent-child and husband-wife dyads. These works mostly explore the perspectives of migrant parents with children “left behind” in their country of origin. Although there is a rich literature on the children of these migrants, particularly on the “second generation”, the focus has been on the social dimension of their experiences rather than on the intimate and relational ones. To fill this gap, this symposium will examine changing intergenerational relationships through the perspectives of children of Asian migrants – Chinese and Filipinos – in Europe and in Asia. Comparing their familial experiences will illuminate the challenges and contradictions they are confronted with as well as the strategies they adopt depending on the opportunity/constrain structures surrounding them. How do these young people experience and view the family? What are the factors affecting their relationships with their parents? How do the specificities of their respective countries of residence (e.g. gender norms) and of their families (e.g. class belonging) shape their decisions and viewpoints? In what way do they express their agency? Drawing from empirically based researches in the fields of migration and family studies, this symposium will address these questions while highlighting the subjectivity and agency of young family members. Its interdisciplinary character will provide different windows through which to view the family in migration context, whereas its comparison of case studies will expose the particularities of individual experiences and their connections with larger socio-structural factors.

Discussant: (associate professor, )

Based on a field survey carried out over a period of four years in the region of Paris and involving young people of Chinese descent who are seeing a psychiatrist in the private or public sector, the present communication is focused on the relationship between these young people and their parents, and more especially on the phenomenon of “inverted parenting,” showing how these migrant children help their parents enjoy the various resources acquired in or related to their host country. The author highlights that this phenomenon of “inverted parenting” could generate intergenerational conflicts between young people and their parents. Living in such intergenerational conflict situation, considered by some children as the sources of their mental health suffering, pushes them to turn to the outside world (school, work, care settings, associations, etc.) in the hope of accessing new possibilities.

Focusing on transnational family strategy, this paper aims to narrate the family stories of Japanese-Filipino children who were born to a Japanese father and a Filipino mother after 1980s. The author conducted in-depth interviews with 45 individuals aged 15-35 during a multi-sited fieldwork in Japan and in the Philippines. Many respondents enjoyed a high mobility across the national border of two countries because of their flexible legal status. They migrated during childhood because of the change in their family relationship and experienced transnational struggles, often as a consequence of the gap between the family norms of both societies and the reality they faced. However, these youths coped with these struggles by maintaining transnational ties through their frequent moves. The notion of youth migration represents the liminality of generations and also family and gender norms of two countries.

A dynamic, bidirectional understanding of adolescent resistance to parental authority is missing not only in the Chinese but also worldwide literature. There is scarcely any research on the adolescents’ own experience of their resistance, their perceptions on their role and influence while interacting with their parents in times of resistance. In response to the seriousness of adolescent resistance in Chinese society, a three-fold study is launched aiming for a comprehensive grasp of the nature of this phenomenon by comparing adolescents from similar Chinese backgrounds, namely mainland China, Taiwan and Belgium. Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) of the migrant Chinese adolescents’ accounts from Belgium revealed adolescent resistance as a special state of mind with a weak sense of the future and an “inflated” sense of agency, the process of resistance was also a struggle with oneself to accept one’s own parents being different from their peers’ parents. Analysis of parents’ accounts revealed that parents were intentionally ready to adapt to their children’s reality, yet difficult to acknowledge their children’s agency and novelty in practice. Such a difficulty is however notably easier for parents with an open attitude for learning.

Parental migration from the Philippines has led to an increasing number of children “left behind”, generally under the care of a female kin. During family reunification, such caregiving arrangements change again, which entails emotional adjustments for the child and for his former caregiver. Examining the case of 1.5-generation Filipinos in France (i.e., migrants who were born in the Philippines but migrated to France before the age of 18) and their grandmothers in the Philippines, this presentation explores their linked experiences and the way they maintain their relationship. Results of ethnographic fieldwork conducted in France and in the Philippines show that the 1.5-generation Filipinos were able to cope with the pain of family separation due to the migration of one or both of their parents with the help of their grandmothers. After moving to France they became even closer emotionally to their caregivers; they idealized their past and hoped to be reunited with them in the future. This situation often caused tensions in their relationship with their parents, notably with their mother who was trying to make up for lost time with their children.

The commencement of school attendance is an important developmental milestone, which is sometimes accompanied by fear in the child. This, of course, is related to what can parents and teachers do at this time for the benefit of the child, to enable the child to develop in a truly harmonious way in the world that surrounds him, to develop appropriately to his/her age, maturity, mental capacity, and capabilities. I believe that to teach a child to be inquisitive, to discover new knowledge with joy, to gradually "take control" of the surrounding world is a long process and the long-term task of educators.

We present here the outputs of data acquisition in children before their entry to the first grade. We collected data in three moments of the transition – before the entry, in September at the beginning of the first school year and in November. To discover the resilient characteristics of the personality of the child, we used the questionnaire DECA (Devereux Early Childhood Assessment), focuses on the resilient characteristics of the child: Initiative, Self-regulation, Attachment/Relationships and Behavioral Concerns. The questionnaire was filled out by parents. We asked parents also three questions about expectations and worries, children express about entering first grade of school. Questioning parents was a pragmatic choice because parents have the ability to perceive various manifestations of expectations about the first class in the context of everyday life. Statements from children during direct interviews may be affected situationally. We chose to interview children after entering the school, where children can talk about direct experience (T2 and T3 of the research). The research sample consists of 111 children aged 4-7 years. According to the parents, children on average do not express worries concerns about starting school. Of the total sample only 2 children express strong worries about entering the school, which we consider a very favorable outcome. Any concerns are related to the demands of the curriculum, next is the fear that the child will not find friends and least concern expressed children in relation to the new teacher.

Objective: Drawing upon Self-Determination Theory (Deci & Ryan, 2000) and Reactance theory (Brehm, 1966) and inspired from the vignette-based study in the school domain developed by Van Petegem, et al. (2015), the present study aimed to examine the association between parental controlling (as opposed to autonomy-supportive) communication style about alcohol-related rules and adolescents’ motivation to change alcohol use. Thereby, we tested for the intervening role of experienced need frustration (i.e., autonomy and relatedness), coping responses (i.e., oppositional defiance and submission) in this association. Method: One hundred thirty-four Swiss adolescents (53% women, Mage = 17.46 years) were offered a vignette describing a parental reaction to an adolescent alcohol use episode. They were randomly assigned to a controlling or an autonomy-supportive condition. Then, we assessed their experienced need frustration, their coping responses, and their motivation to change. Results: Path analyses indicate that a controlling communication style related to autonomy and relatedness frustration, which predicted more submission and more oppositional defiance, respectively. In turn, oppositional defiance was negatively associated with the intent to change alcohol use patterns (i.e., moderation and abstention), whereas submission related positively to change motivation. Adolescents’ trait reactance proneness related to more relatedness frustration and more oppositional defiance. Conclusions: These results suggest that parental communication style plays an important role in adolescent’ intention to change alcohol use patterns.

Many students do not seem interested in learning and therefore make no effort. Some factors such as interest, effort, goals, progress, sense of self-worth, autonomy, cost, expectations and commitment shape the class, teacher and family motivational climates in which students learn, and they are built in interactions with the contexts in which they develop. This study develops and validates the Family Motivational Climate Questionnaires for Parents and Adolescents (FMC-P and FMC-A, which consider the aforementioned motivations factors. Both comprise four indicators: communication, parents as models, activity structure and relationship with teachers. 800 families (adolescents in middle and high school and their parents) from Madrid and Santiago de Cuba completed the questionnaires along with other measures for validation purposes. Reliability and factorial analyses were performed. Results support the expected reliability and structure of the questionnaires. The FMC-A predicted the degree in which parents attributed changes in different motivational variables (interest, effort, expectations of success and satisfaction) to themselves. Additionally, communication and relationship with teachers had more influence on the FMC for parents than for adolescents. Cultural differences emerged in all factors between Cuban and Spanish families, particularly in school-family relationship and opportunity of autonomy offered to adolescents. The questionnaires have been cross-culturally validated in two countries showing good reliability and predictive power. They provide clues for the development of a psychoeducational intervention and can be used to identify areas of the FMC that may need some improvement to foster adolescents’ learning motivation.

Despite the pressure on work-family polices arising from the increase in nonstandard working times in various sectors, only a few studies have addressed managerial practices in relation to nonstandard working hours. This paper investigates the challenges managers face in meeting the various tensions stemming from nonstandard working hours. We were especially interested in possible challenges relating to work shift planning and informal work-family practices. We focus on two typical 24/7 work contexts: hospitality and retail industries and day and night childcare. The data comprise focus group interviews with managers (N=20) working in hotels, stores and service stations with restaurants and shopping facilities and survey data on directors (N=34) of day- and night-care centers. While in both contexts work takes place around the clock, day and night care center management is further complicated by the fact that the clients (parents, children) also have nonstandard work and care schedules. The results show that managers in both sectors are faced with unpredictability in employee working times and variation in service demand. However, whereas in the hospitality and retail industries the tension is between the cost-effectiveness of services and employee wellbeing, the day and night care center director has to take into account the viewpoints of not only the service provider and employees, but also parents and children. Successful management thus requires understanding of multiple perspectives and family diversity as well as the ability to cope with constant change.

Gender inequality in many societies is driven by the unequal distribution of paid work between men and women, in particular after the birth of a child. The majority of research on women’s return to the labour market post childbearing, however, has exclusively examined the characteristics of the women themselves. We argue that labour market decisions are taken with regard to the situation of the couple, and the characteristics of the male partner also need to be taken into account. Using the German Socio-Economic Panel and employing discrete event-history analysis, we examine how quickly women return to the labour market and their subsequent hours of employment using two indicators of the male partner’s employment flexibility as central predictors. We find that after experiencing the transition to parenthood, a father’s employment situation influences a mother’s employment behaviour, specifically, that lower working hours and higher levels of flexibility in a father’s employment schedule facilitates a mother’s return to the labour market. We propose that more employment flexibility allows him to share childcare responsibilities, which give her the opportunity to be employed. This association, however, is found to be mediated by household income, reflecting the traditional gender division of paid work and family responsibilities in Germany.

Background: It is relatively common in Western Australia for men to commute long distances and work away from home for extended periods of time in the mining industry. These fly-in-fly-out (FIFO) workers are thought to be especially vulnerable to psychological disturbances and relationship problems that affect them and their partners. To date there is little research on the health and wellbeing of FIFO workers and their families. This study aimed to compare the psychological and social characteristics of pregnant women and their FIFO partners with pregnant women and their partners who were not FIFO workers.

Methods: Data from a pregnancy cohort study conducted in a single region of Western Australia were analysed (n = 394 families). Married couples completed questionnaires about quality of life, anxiety, depression, stress, couple adjustment, family functioning, job satisfaction, financial crisis, and problematic use of drugs or alcohol. Comparisons were made between three groups for both women and their partner: FIFO workers, non-FIFO regular schedule workers, and non-FIFO irregular schedule workers.

Results and Conclusions: While the differences in levels of mental health and relationship difficulties between FIFO couples and non-FIFO couples were not statistically significant, these differences show a trend of pregnant women whose partners were FIFO workers experiencing increased levels of stress and decreased satisfaction with family functioning compared to their non-FIFO counterparts. Although FIFO workers accepted the benefits of higher financial rewards, they were more likely to be dissatisfied with work schedule flexibility than non-FIFO workers were.

Family daycare, as to be understood as paid care for children within the care provider’s household, represents a specific interconnection between work and family, which hasn’t been closely focused on yet. In this setting the cared for children participate in the normal daily routine of the care provider’s family. Therefore the care provider is not only working at home, but the content of work is family life.

Compatibility of family and work has been widely debated in several sociological sub-disciplines. One central aspect is the increasing dissolution of traditional boundaries between these domains. Consequently, families are confronted with the challenge to actively draw up new borders themselves to create the family sphere.

In my presentation I focus on the group of family daycare providers. From a perspective of family sociology I will address the following questions: In which respect becomes managing boundaries between family and work important in the context of family daycare? How do family daycare providers cope with doing care as an activity of work and family at the same time?

In my dissertation project I explore these questions through semistructured transcribed interviews and by participant observation. The sample contains 10 interviews with family daycare providers and 10 with parents of the cared for children. At current stage of research 5 interviews with daycare providers have been realised. Following the analytical approach of objective hermeneutics, I use sequence analysis for interpretation. As preliminary results strategies of boundary management on spatial, temporal, emotional and social level could be identified.

The prenatal loss of a child is a significant phenomenon, as 10-25% of women lose at least one pregnancy (Adolfsson, Larsson, 2006; Barton-Smoczyńska, 2006; Bowels i in., 2006).

Next to the the medical aspects of loss also it has a psychological dimension. It is ranks among the traumatic events. Frost and Condon (1996) reviewed 123 articles on the psychological consequences of miscarriage. A characteristic symptom of the test persons was felt mourning. The consequences of psychiatric appeared in the form of depression, anxiety and post traumatic stress disorder. This proves the rightness treatment of miscarriage, and fetal death as a traumatic experience.

As follows from the research, support from the environment emerges as an important factor in coping with a loss. We want to show what kind of support and from whom receive people who have lost a child in the prenatal period. In our study involved 30 couples who have lost a child in the prenatal period, and 30 infertile couples. In the study was used Kmiecik-Baran's Social Support Scale.

Introduction. Pregnancy via assisted reproductive technology (ART) has been described as both rewarding and stressful, given the struggle to conceive. For future parents, prenatal testing may be an additional stressor, heightening their anxiety. This study assessed how couples provided and received support from their partners during this stressful time, and how that support affected their levels of anxiety and depression.

Method. N = 103 couples (52 who used ART and 51 who conceived spontaneously (SP)) completed questionnaires before and after the first-trimester screening and after the morphological ultrasound to assess social support (Dyadic Coping Inventory, Bodenmann, 2008), anxiety (STAI, Vonder, 1986), and depression (EPDS, Cox et al., 1987) using linear mixed models.

Results. Results indicated that: (1) the amount of support that ART and SP men reported to provide to their female partners did not differ (t = -0.598, ns); (2) ART women felt they received less support from their partners than SP women (t = -2.626**); (3) SP women were less anxious (t = 3.365***) and less depressed (t = 3.148**) when they felt supported by their partners, whereas being supported did not decrease anxiety or depression in ART women ; (4) higher levels of depression in ART men increased depressive symptoms in their partners (t = 2.575*).

Conclusion. Perceived support from their partners does not appear to benefit ART women even though it does help reduce anxiety and depression levels in SP women. Pregnancy after infertility challenges both partners: it may affect how they perceive and provide helpful support.

In the last decade research on the concept of coparenting has grown and is mostly understood as a central element of family life influencing parental and child adjustment as well as parenting practices and embedded in partnership quality and parental characteristics. Studies concerning coparenting often focus on divorced families or nuclear families, stepfamilies and cohabiting families are often neglected. Therefore the aim of this study is to test the theoretical “ecological model of Coparenting” (Feinberg 2003) for these family types and compare these two family types with nuclear families. To apply this approach we use the second wave of the German dataset „Growing up in Germany (AID:A). This nationally representative dataset with 22.000 target persons and extensive information about the household composition is well suited for these sorts of analysis. We use subsample of 0-17 year old target children living either with one social and one biological parent in one household (stepfamily) or with two biological cohabiting parents in one household and test die interplay between coparenting, partnership quality, parental depression, child adjustment (SDQ), parenting practices as well as parental adjustment (excessive demands on parental role) with structural equation models (SEM). First results reveal that there are similar patterns of coparenting relations in stepfamilies and nuclear families. We expect that this is also true for cohabiting families.

The transition to parenthood represents a critical and potentially stressful event. To effectively cope with this experience, coping strategies involve not only the individual partners, but the dyad as a whole. Numerous studies have highlighted how the ability of the parents-to-be to adjust to this critical transition is influenced by individual and interpersonal factors.

Aim of the present study is to examine dyadic coping styles in the two partners, specifically targeting aspects of congruence and incongruence. Furthermore, the relationship between dyadic coping and individual and interpersonal variables will be examined.

A sample of 78 couples expecting their first child were recruited while attending prenatal classes in Northern Italy. Each partner completed a set of questionnaires examining: dyadic coping (Dyadic Coping Inventory), anxiety (State-Trait Anxiety Inventory), depression (Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale), social support (Multidimensional Scale of Perceived Social Support), and marital quality (Dyadic Adjustment Scale). Descriptive statistics and bivariate correlations will be calculated among the major study variables. The Actor-Partner Interdependence Model (APIM) will be used to examine actor and partner effects of individual and relational outcomes on couples’ dyadic coping.

Overall couples presented high scores of adaptive coping and individual and relational well-being. Results of the APIM model will highlight that for couples who present good individual and relational outcomes more congruent dyadic coping strategies exist. Furthermore, the analysis of actor and partner effects will highlight relational exchanges that characterize the dyad in this time of adjustment.

Parenthood is important and demanding phase of life. E.g. tightening demands of working life and retrenchments of welfare state are setting challenges for parents. They need social support to cope with tasks and demands connected to parenthood.

Organized peer groups are noteworthy but quite meagerly studied sources of social support. In my presentation, I observe social support attracted from a peer group from mothers’ point of view. Presentation bases on my current PhD project, which finds out what kind of meaning social support gained from a peer group has for mothers. The study is a case study, which concerns certain group of mothers established in 1980s to finnish suburb. Both employees and volunteers are working in the group as persons in charge.

The data is gathered ethnographically. Firstly, the data consists of fieldnotes gathered during participant observation and the documents produced of operation of the group. Secondly, the data includes interviews of mothers and persons in charge participating in the operation of the group. The data will be analysed applying hermeneutic phenomenological approach.

According to the expected results, the peer group is a significant source of social support for mothers. They experience to get support both from each other and from persons in charge. It seems that social support has an empowering meaning for mothers.

Families in Western societies have become more diverse. Whereas the heterosexual married couple with children used to be the only legitimate “family”, now other arrangements such as registered partnerships, unmarried cohabitation and same-sex couples are increasingly common. Also, more and more children are born to unmarried parents and more couples remain childless.

In this study, we compare the views people hold of the family in France and the Netherlands. These two countries differ in the prevalence of certain family forms as well as in the timing with which these alternative family forms have been embedded in the law.

Using data collected in a special module on family definitions and family inclusion in the Dutch LISS panel and the French ELIPSS panel, we compare the two countries on the extent to which the label of “family” is associated with various aspects of couple relationships: the level of institutionalization of the couple, such as marriage or registered partnership, the gender composition of the couple (opposite sex versus same sex male and female couples), and the presence of children. Using a vignette design with the vignette depicting a family gathering, we aimed to ascertain (by proxy) the boundaries of inclusion by a different means.

The aim of this project is to better understand how the French and the Dutch think about the family in the face of legal and demographic developments in family formation in Europe in recent decades.

Marriage rates have been significantly decreasing and divorce rates have been significantly increasing, over the last decades in Western Europe (Eurostat, 2014). In some countries, rates of birth outside wedlock are now close to rates of birth inside wedlock. New sexual and marital tropes and norms develop, largely influenced by the medias (Bajos & Bozon, 2008). The definition of the family no longer overlaps the definition of the household. In many cases, family may be defined as a geographically scattered network of affinities more than as a kinship group. These changes invite to focus on the notions of 'doing family' (Morgan, 2011) and on the interactions between 'family configurations' (Widmer, 2010) and their social environment. Everywhere, several cultural factors affect the implementation of the kinship functions (Godelier, 2004).

Today, some single individuals prefer to raise children by themselves; others prefer to involve more than one (adult) partner in family practices. It questions monogamy as a mainstay of family and Western kinship. It also raises epistemological questions in family and kinship studies.

This presentation highlights social and cultural factors contributing to non monogamous family pathways and configurations, in Belgium, France, Luxembourg and Switzerland.

Data gathers written and recorded life stories from non-monogamous mothers and fathers, online and field observations among non-monogamous parents, and a score of articles, books, videos, and websites produced or used by the actors of non-monogamous families. The study is restricted to French-speaking informants. Data management may be discussed.

Previous results based on the Swiss Household Panel demonstrated that in the 2000s childbearing within cohabitation may be considered as an avant-garde family style rather than a marker of poverty.

However, the increase of out-of-wedlock children rose from 7% in 1995 to 22 % in 2014. Then, extra-marital births cannot anymore be considered scarce in the context of the 2010s. The presentation aims at understanding to what extend childbearing within marriage and cohabitation are still different; or contrariwise to what extend it is slightly becoming an alternative to marriage?

Based on data from the Swiss “Family and Generation survey 2013”, we investigate to what extend individuals who marry or cohabit still present different opinions and attitudes toward different aspects of life such as family attitudes, gender opinion and family organization. The particularity of this presentation is to consider the heterogeneity of cohabitation. Three different groups are distinguished: first a group of married individuals, second a group of cohabitant individuals and third, a group of individuals who declared to be divorced and having a new conjugal relationship with a partner living in the household.

Based on ordinal regression first preliminary results tend to indicate that cohabiting and married individuals differ: individuals who are cohabiting after a divorce tend to declare more negative affect and more work family life balance difficulties compared to the cohabitant and married groups. Concerning family’s attitudes, the two groups of cohabitants still seem to present less traditional attitudes on family compared to the married group.

This study offers a theoretical reflection upon the foundation of the determinants of the family ambivalence in Spain from the cultural and the institutional dimension. There are two main reasons for it: on one hand, it is confirmed the scarcity of studies that have focused their attention on this objective in the case of Spain, on the other hand, the studies carried out in the international context have confirmed the analytical effectiveness of researching on the attitude and value changes to explain the meaning and rhythm of the family changes (O'Brien, 2009; Treviño et al. 2009; Cooke, 2010; Daly and Scheiwe, 2010).

The data analysis shows that more than the half of the Spanish population living with a partner and children under the school year organise their family life according to a pattern of living arrangement closer to the traditional values than to the egalitarian ones. The predominant family models of the Spanish population is not coherent with their family models preferences as this study has proven. The results obtained show the ambivalence of the Spanish family. As a conclusion it must be highlighted that the results of the present analysis confirm the need of deepening the understanding of the Spanish family contradictory transformation.

This research project aims to examine the dynamics of interaction and reciprocal dependence structures among Turkish family members who have settled in Duisburg. The central research question is determined by the development of intergenerational lebenswelt, or “lifeworld,” contexts and the transitions throughout the lives of Turkish settlers and future generations.

The exploration of transition procedures are based on biographic narrative interviews with family members. The data will be interpreted following Rosenthal’s method of analysis, which deduces the experienced and narrated biography and outlines a complex understanding of a person. This biographical procedure initiates conclusions about normative notions of social structure and knowledge order as well as construction of meaning and cultural formation.

The evaluation of the data thus far explores indications to applicable intergenerational transition. This can be reconstructed by the development of socio-economic advancement from first generation and second-generation Turkish immigrants in Germany.

Based on empirical qualitative research analysis the study derives more information about the Turkish family and living in Germany. Furthermore it offers possible explanations how families can be supported.

This paper foregounds visibly ethnically different families (Phoenix, 2011) in Denmark These comprise both.families with parents from two different countries (India and Denmark) and families with transnational adoptees (South Korea). The former are barely scientifically explored due to the dominant colorblindness discourse, while later comprise a heated topic challenging poor (global south) adoptee meeting a loving Danish family’ discourse.

How do these family members narrate their experiences of societal encounter is the research question, which is answered through two qualitative interview studies of intermarried persons N =14, (Singla, 2015) and transnational adoptees N= 35 (Myong, 2011). respectively.The narratives are analysed for the meaning making processes within theoretical frameworks comprising of intersectionality combined with everyday life approach in the former and poststructuralism in the latter.

The results indicate both the possibilities and the limitations involved, highlighting the internal - intersubjective experiences, and the external aspects - the structural factors, other(s) gaze towards the visible differences. Furthermore some parental experiences in transmitting racial literacy- identifying racism as a serious problem and preparing children to cope are seen. For the transnational adoptees, inclusion as Danish implies exclusion from categories such as Korean. Also anxiety from the adoptive family regarding exclusion/alienation entails ambivalences and paradoxes.

Alongside colorblindness, limited/ missing racialisation discussions, the visible bodies of spouses, children in the mixed families and the transnational adoptees are made salient in their everyday lives in interactions with the white majority population through experiences as gaze, curious questions concerning the ethnic origin or direct exclusions.

Post-enlargement labour migration within the EU boosted research interests regarding the changing family relations within the 'borderless Europe', especially with regard to the impact of migration on parenting and children. This article seeks to explore how care-arrangements of migrating parents and parents who stay behind are configured by institutional contexts in both sending and receiving countries. The target group of the research is parents who migrated from Poland, Romania and Latvia their countries’ accession to the EU and work in the lower-paid sectors of the Swedish labour market. Study participants were recruited in Sweden for qualitative interviews using a range of different sites, including NGO and trade union organisations, formal and personal networks, as well as snowballing. Drawing on Kilkey & Merlas' analytical approach to families' care-giving arrangements as being situated in a particular institutional context, the article argues that the rights to welfare and family life in Sweden are conditional and highly stratified according to the working migrant residence and employment statuses. The analysis highlights the complex implications that the Swedish and homes countries national policies have on migrants’ personal experiences of parenting across the borders through the following questions: How do motivation for migration and its temporary character change over time? What are the ambivalences in providing care across the borders? What is the role of informal networks in mitigating the institutional constrains? What motivates migrants to reunite with their children and/or partners in Sweden or to continue living apart as a transnational family?

TBA

In my lecture I will examine the struggle of East European female migrants and their significant others to reconcile their deeply held values about good mothering practices with the imperative of leaving their families to work abroad. I elaborate how over the last 20 years the concept of intensive motherhood as an ideal and a norm has gained significant traction, not only in Western capitalist care worker receiving but also in post socialist Eastern European migrant sending countries. Given the historical background this comes as a surprise as during state socialism the co-breadwinner model in combination with state support from cradle to grave was favored over the ‘bourgeois’ male breadwinner and housewife model. With the case studies of Ukrainian shuttle migrant in Poland I demonstrate that the newly emerged motherhood ideal has become a growing problem for circular migrants who leave their home, children, spouses and elderly parents behind. As their outward-bound mobility proves to be inconsistent with post-transition motherhood expectations, they are caught in dilemmas. With the case study of the stay-behind husband of a Polish migrant care worker (to Germany) I will finally demonstrate the predicaments and contradictory expectations concerning fatherhood and masculinity under conditions of migrant family fragmentation.

Western modern societies are changing going along with new ways of life, different age compositions and increasing shares of migrants. Simultaneously, all across Europe we see a withdrawal of welfare states. These changes affect relationships between generations and cultures, and social support. Especially marginalized groups such as migrants and older people are adversely affected. The planned symposium comprises of four presentations on social networks and social support of older migrants in Europe.

She develops a typology of Turkish late-life stayer and migrant families using multiple dimensions of intergenerational solidarity based on a “binational” and “dissimilation” perspective comparison: (1) Do relationships […] reflect the patterns prevalent in the origin context, indicating mechanisms of ethnic retention, or do they show migration-specific adjustments in terms of dissimilation? (2) Do relationship patterns […] differ across the European countries, suggesting impacts of macro-context factors? First results suggest strong Turkish family ties with intense contact, intergenerational exchange of advice and support and high normative solidarity. Little evidence appears of dissimilation from the context of origin. Most remarkably, attitudes seem to change to a larger extent than behavior.

Contrary to initial expectations, many EU citizens who arrived in the UK after 2004 have not been temporary and transient but rather have extended their stay and shown signs of settling in. Based on in-depth interviews with Polish migrants in London, this paper examines opportunities but also obstacles that migrants face in negotiating belonging and attachment in local contexts. In so doing, the paper aims to understand the processes and mechanisms that enable and hinder settling into particular places.

Migration scholars frequently discuss intra-EU migration in terms of circularity, temporariness and liquidity (Collett, 2013). As a result there has been less academic discussion of how European migrants negotiate attachment and belonging (Erdal and Oeppen, 2013) and how these may be gendered. I use the concept of ‘embedding’ (Ryan and Mulholland, 2015) to explore the multi-layered and dynamic processes of negotiating identifications and attachments spatially and temporally.

In particular, I focus on networks of care and examine the gender dimensions of place-effects to understand how men and women mediate inter-generational caring relationships through time and place. For example, caring for children in London, while simultaneously caring about ageing parents in Poland can lead to dilemmas and tensions in the migration trajectory. In this way, I present migrant ‘embedding’ as an emplaced and embodied, gendered process.

Lea Ellwardt focusses on “Which types of non-kin networks relate to survival in late adulthood? A latent-class approach”. She investigates the association between older adults’ survival rates and integration into different types of non-kin networks. Respondents are classified into distinct types of non-kin networks, based on differences in number of non-kin, social support received from non-kin and contact frequency with non-kin. Membership in network types is next related to mortality. Four latent types of non-kin networks differ in their associations with mortality, independent of socio-demographic and health confounders. Older adults integrated into networks high in both amount and variation of supportive non-kin contacts have higher chances of survival than older adults embedded in networks low in either amount or variation, or both. Measurements on the first migrant cohort will be provided in the near future.

Finally, Martina Brandt, Judith Kaschowitz and Jennifer Klöckner broach the issue of “migration, social networks and social support across life course”. Using the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) they examine social support networks among natives and immigrants (Turkish, Greek, Italian, Yugoslavian, Rumanian, Polish, Russian and migrants from the former Soviet Union). They focus on changes of social relationships and social support over life course attributing this to the context of country of origin and cohorts. First results show significant inter-ethnic and inter-generational differences of social capital and social support. In contrast to shares of relatives, migrant networks vary stronger by amounts of fellow natives: Turkish migrants integrate more persons of the same origin into their networks than other migrants, but less than Germans. Polish and Rumanian networks consist of most Germans. Further, network compositions are rather inter-generationally than ethnically determined. Second generation networks comprise of less relatives, less migrants of the same origin and more Germans. Nevertheless, Yugoslavian generations differ less than Turkish, Greek, and Italian. Further, Turks and Greeks significantly name family members as supposed caregivers more often but mention professional caregivers less often than Germans and other migrants (2001 and 2006). Expectations of social support by family members are likewise affected by country of origin. Hence, different needs of social support in life course and diverse ways of compensating deprivation by nation are expected.

With the growth in the service economy, 24-hour operations and communication technologies, many parents today work nonstandard hours during evenings, nights and weekends. Although various studies have found a linkage between parental nonstandard working time and negative outcomes for families and children, researchers agree that there is considerable diversity in the circumstances of families in which parents work nonstandard hours, including different degrees of predictability and autonomy over working time as well as in work conditions. The connection between parental working time and children’s wellbeing may also be affected by the wider socio-cultural context, such as work and family policies, availability of childcare arrangements, and cultural norms. This workshop aims to facilitate a scholarly exchange of research on the challenges stemming from various aspects of nonstandard working time to the wellbeing of family and children across different countries. The four papers approach nonstandard working time and families using diverse methodologies and from the perspectives of different family members.

Wen-Jui Han presents findings on the effects of parental working time patterns and wellbeing based on a sample of Chinese children. China, which is in the process of moving from being a primarily agrarian to an increasingly urban and market-oriented society, presents one of the most dramatic examples of a rapid socioeconomic transition in recent human history. Han found that children whose fathers worked nonstandard hours (particularly at night or on rotating shifts) had more behavioural, social and attention problems and poorer academic performance, when rated by their teachers.

Jianghong Li’s paper examines the association between both parents working nonstandard schedules and the social and emotional wellbeing of their children in the Australian context, using data from the Raine Study, with special focus on adolescents aged 16-17 years. The paper takes into account variations in family socioeconomic status and demographic characteristics, and investigates the possible moderating role they play in the link between nonstandard work schedules and child outcomes.

Sabine Andresen brings a new element to the debate on working time: poverty and living in disadvantaged conditions. She presents the results of a qualitative study of German families living under precarious conditions. Nonstandard work schedules are accompanied by insecure, temporary jobs and periods of unemployment. These families, who are often the object of demoralizing comments, struggle with bureaucratic obstacles, including constantly changing contact persons and the barely penetrable jungle of information on the public support system.

Eija Sevon and her colleagues approach the 24-h society from the point of view of young children who, on account of both parents’ nonstandard hours, attend day and night care. Finland is among the few countries in the world that offer public early child education outside normal business hours. They used a mobile diary method to compare children in regular day care with those in day and night care. They found that parental working patterns shape the daily lives of children by affecting daily routines, schedules and relationships with adults and peers, in both positive and negative ways

Discussant: Academy researcher ,

Demographic and societal trends, coupling with globalization, in recent decades around the world have changed the forms of parental employment and thus the way we care for our children. Research using data from developed countries such as United States have shown that parents working at hours that are early morning, evenings, nights, or rotating shifts may have compromised children’s well-being to certain degree. China presents one of the most dramatic examples of rapid socioeconomic transition in recent human history. This paper builds upon and extends beyond the existing literature to examine, as the first, this issue using a sample of children who were first graders in Spring 2014 in Shanghai, China. Approximately a quarter of the mothers and one-third of the fathers in our sample worked at nonstandard hours regularly. Using propensity score matching analysis, results indicate that children whose fathers working at nonstandard hours particularly at night or rotating shifts, had significantly worse behavioral problems in areas of internalizing, social problems, and attention; these children also had significantly worse academic performance rated by their teachers. As China is moving from being a primarily agrarian society with a planned economy to one that is increasingly urban and market-oriented enterprises, the tremendous economic and demographic shifts that may impact family and child well-being in an immense manner are due for a more in-depth understanding, for the benefit of well-being of the world.

This study aims to examine the link between working nonstandard schedules (evenings, nights, weekends, irregular or rotating on-call schedules) in both parents and the social and emotional wellbeing of their adolescent children. The study is based on data from the Western Australian Pregnancy Cohort (Raine) Study, with a focus on adolescents of 16/17 years. Multivariate linear and non-linear models are used to estimate the effect of parents’ nonstandard hours on the social and emotional wellbeing (mental health and behaviour) of adolescents. Reports from both parents and adolescents on the Child Behavioural Check List (CBCL) developed by Achenbach were used to measure the social and emotional wellbeing of adolescents. Based on the CBCL, three outcome variables are examined: total behavioural problems, internalising problems, and externalising behaviours. In all analyses family socioeconomic and demographic characteristics are adjusted, including family income, family structure, mother’s and father’s education, their occupational status, the number of siblings and the gender of the adolescent. Preliminary results so far have shown that in dependent of family socioeconomic status, parents’ nonstandard schedules are associated with an increased risk of behavioural problems in adolescents. Further analysis will examine possible interactions between parental nonstandard work schedules and child gender, family income, parents’ education, and family structure

Nonstandard working time has in earlier studies linked to precarious work conditions in terms of low salary, atypical work and insecurity. In this paper I present results of a qualitative study of disadvantaged families living in poverty in Germany. I focus on personal perspectives and experiences of mothers and fathers as experts. Up to now, political debates and practical recommendations have hardly ever taken the experiences and perceptions of the families into account, even though they are the only true experts on their situation. The study explores whether public support measures in Germany actually reach socially disadvantaged families in the intended way by focusing particularly on the conditions for success and failure revealed in the interaction processes between deprived families and professionals. To understand why support measures fail, we conducted qualitative interviews with professionals and deprived families. Parents outline their struggles with bureaucratic obstacles, constantly changing contact persons, and the barely penetrable jungle of information on the public support system. The results create an awareness for the host of problems that deprived families often have to handle simultaneously. When sickness, unemployment, lack of appreciation, and constant repetition of telling one’s life story accumulate, families feel tired and powerless. Very important is the issue of time as a question of participating in labor market and a value of being a “good” parent.

For parents working nonstandard schedules, it is difficult to find high quality childcare. Public day and night care, providing childcare and early childhood education for families working nonstandard hours, is a Finnish innovation. Although the need for childcare during nonstandard hours has increased internationally, research is lacking on the availability and quality of such childcare. In particular, little research exists on flexible childcare from the standpoint of young children’s daily lives and wellbeing. This study, as part of the larger Families 24/7 study, explores the daily rhythms of emotional wellbeing among young children in daycare. A specific aim was to compare children who attend daycare during regular daytime hours with children who, owing to parent’s nonstandard work schedules, attend daycare outside office hours. Participants were 32 children, aged 4 to 7, and their care providers. Parents and day care center personnel evaluated children’s moods three times per day for one week with a mobile diary application. The results showed not only differences in daily rhythms between the two groups of children, but also gender differences. The children in day and night care, with highly individual care times, had more individual and irregular mood rhythms. The 24-h society and parental nonstandard working hours affect children individually: for some the effects may be beneficial but for others it may be upsetting and a burden.

Old age comes with health deterioration and limitations in everyday activities, as well as feelings of loneliness and depression. When there is a shortfall between the care and support a person needs and what they actually receive, we are in the presence of unmet needs for support. We investigate the degree of unmet needs for support, as well as the risk factors for such a situation, using Generation and Gender Survey data for Romania (wave 1). We found that the absence of close family members increases the chances for the person to experience feelings of loneliness and not receiving emotional support. Elderly living in urban settlements display lower chances of having unmet needs than their rural counterparts. Similar results were found when analysing feelings of depression and the emotional support received. Persons without a partner are several times more likely to be in a situation of unmet emotional needs than those with a living partner. It appears that difficulties in making ends meet increase the feelings of depression, as well as the probability of not receiving emotional support in this situation. Age is the most important factor when it comes to persons that need regular help in care and do not receive it. The older the person is, the higher the chances are to be in a situation of unmet needs for care. The role of a living partner becomes insignificant this time, as they would have been equally old and not able to provide personal care.

We applied V. L. Bengtson’s six-dimensional model of intergenerational solidarity to a population of Czech families providing care for elderly family members. We found that the complexity of the issue could be summarized into a single one-dimensional construct (Family Cohesion Index). We used a sample of 413 Czech families caring for a senior family member over the age of 75 who is need of personal care. Our research question was: Why is family solidarity a multidimensional construct for the United States and a one-dimensional construct for Czech families? We considered the importance of socio-psychological assumptions for intergenerational family cohesion: family members a) have strong emotional bonds with each other; b) are in frequent contact; c) provide each other with mutual assistance; d) share similar values and opinions; e) feel obliged and responsible for the family as a whole; f) are committed to the family even at personal cost. Bengtson et al. studied the entire U.S. population and found that the strength of ties between family members varies across a person’s lifetime. Therefore, in their sample such unifying conditions did not appear. By contrast, we tested only the families that actually provided care for their elderly members. The Family Cohesion Index (FCI) was constructed as the sum of five indexes, i.e. indexes of emotional solidarity, former associational solidarity, present associational solidarity, consensual solidarity and functional solidarity. Our conclusion is that a one-dimensional construct is feasible and appropiate for Czech families caring for elderly members.

In times of population aging and its pressure on social security programmes it is particularly important to understand the determinants of intergenerational family transfers. Here we study exchanges of support between elderly parents and their children in Hungary, which is a rapidly ageing country with relatively low state involvement in elderly care. We describe patterns of time transfers (personal care and household help) received from children using data from the Survey of Health Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) wave 4. Our aim is to situate Hungary among the transfer regimes typical in European countries and to describe the main determinants of upward time transfers in a comparative context. Following Brandt et al. (2012) we differentiate between occasional and intensive time transfers and construct multivariate models of the probability of transfers with both parental and child characteristics as explanatory variables. Results showed that intensive time transfers were received by the more „needy” parents: those of higher age, living alone, having health problems and having lower income. Gender and proximity also play a role: intensive transfers were most often received by parents from daughters and children living close. In case of occasional transfers we find evidence of short-term reciprocity: non-intensive support was more often received by parents who gave transfers to children. Eastern European countries have generally high level of intensive support, but are heterogeneous in terms of non-intensive support. Hungary occupies a middle position among Eastern European countries.

The proportions of adults living in the same house as their parents are higher in eastern Europe than in western or northern Europe. We attempt to identify how different characteristics of both parents and adult children are associated with the likelihood of living together in the same house. We adopt a theoretical model that considers that opportunity and needs, as well as family structures, are important in this process. We use data from the first wave of the Generations and Gender Survey for seven Eastern European countries (Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Georgia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Russia) and we address the issue from the adult child's perspective. We distinguish three situations of intergenerational co-residence: people who have never left the parental home, people who left and later returned to the parental home and people who took their parents to live with them. For a multivariate analysis, we use multinomial logistic regression. We found a connection between the needs and opportunities of children and parents, and the different situations of co-residence. Weaker opportunities for children, as well as parents' needs, characterize co-residence in the parental home. Meanwhile, better children’s opportunities and parents' needs increase the likelihood of co-residence in the child's home. Acquiring an independent dwelling is strongly connected with marriage and any other situation strongly increases co-residence, especially if the child has never been married.

Family relationships matter throughout life. They can be a ressource or a burden, for many individuals they are ressource and burden at the same time. In the life of those who grew up in foster care, the relationships with their biological family members are of particular significance and often they are particular complicated.

How young adults from foster care deal with family relationships and how their relationships with their families changes over time is analyzed in a qualitative longitudinal study at the University of Siegen, Germany. The first interview wave took place between 2007 – 2010. We conducted 100 biographical interviews with young adults from foster care. Most of them aged 18-25. The second interview wave takes place from 2014 – 2016. Up to now we were able to re-interview 14 interviewees. The interview partners were between 24 and 35 years old.

We conducted semi-biographical interviews with them about what happened inbetween interview 1 and 2.

All interviews have in common that the biological family matters and the relationship changes over time. Family relationships are lived in different ways, they differ in their importance and in their meaning for transitions in young adult life (romantic relationships, parenthood, school-to-job-transition). Different patterns of relationships with the biological family and their meaning over time will be presented and discussed.

In all our European societies there are children who cannot grow up in their biological family. For these children, contacts with their biological are considered as particular important. This study is part of an ongoing extensive research that investigates the association between outcomes of foster care, according to the perspectives of foster carers, and the existence, or not, of contact between looked after children and their family. It assesses the perception that foster carers have about looked after children’s reactions during and after the contact visit, as well as the difficulties identified in carrying out the contact visits and the placement outcomes. The questionnaires were completed by foster carers between October 2013 and March 2014 and included 217 looked after children integrated in foster care in the Oporto District, which belonged to 159 biological families and were integrated in 140 different foster care families.

The main results show that contact between looked after children and their biological family does not influence significantly the outcomes of foster care; foster care outcomes were in the majority of the cases classified as successful; the long term placement and almost quasi-adoption is the most common type of foster care in Portugal; logistical difficulties, such as travel costs or the distance between the residences of biological families and foster carers; information and communication technologies can have a significant role in this context, such as social networks, since it may contribute to the maintenance of contact and closeness with the biological family.

This presentation maps the legal and political landscape in which Muslim marriages and divorces are situated in contemporary Europe and offers a review of how Northern and Western European States in particular have responded to the challenges posed by practices of Islamic family law. Three dimensions of wellbeing (material, relational and ethical, following White 2010) are examined in the context of European policies and legislation relating to transnational family life. In a legal context, the material aspect of wellbeing may be seen as fair distribution or procedural norms, the relational aspect as paying attention to autonomy and dependency, and the ethical aspect as the possibility of ethical subjectivity and engagement with questions of justice in legal arenas. In all these dimensions, gender and other identity categories act as important categories of analysis. This article contributes by adopting the concept of wellbeing as the prism of analysis, analysing how the concept of wellbeing translates to legal norms and rights and asking whether and how the legal framework contributes to the wellbeing of Muslim families. The article offers a discussion of wellbeing on three levels: 1) a jurisprudential analysis on wellbeing and rights in the context of marriage and divorce in European human rights law, 2) a literature review on European legal approaches to Muslim marriages and divorce and how they foster wellbeing and 3) a closer examination of relevant case law from European institutions.

Finland has been maintained as a social service state in which childcare services are universally provided and available for all (Anttonen & Sipilä 1994; Eydal & Rostgaard 2011). Having said this Finnish childcare policies can be labelled also controversial and complex. They encourage children’s participation in early childhood education, but they also support home and informal care, and private childcare production by different kinds of cash-for-care benefits. The Finnish model is often considered as securing equality between families, but municipal childcare systems and cash-for-care benefits vary increasingly. The government’s new policies to limit families’ right to municipal day care intensify these complexities.

The municipal variations and the system of cash-for-care benefits can be considered as a potential source of inequalities. The presentation will discuss how Finnish childcare policies may condition parental childcare decisions, and consequently, contribute to children’s early education trajectories. The presentation will introduce the new consortium research project “Finnish childcare policies: In/Equality in Focus” funded by the Strategic Research Council (SRC) at the Academy of Finland that studies possible inequalities in childcare between regions and families. The project will be carried out in collaboration with 10 municipalities that provide different combinations of childcare services and cash benefits. The study applies a multi-method and longitudinal approach. The data consist of documents, expert interviews, survey, parent and child interviews as well as recordings of institutional interaction.

The Italian Supreme Court has recently debated the impact of the change of sex in existing marriages (Case 8097/2015); the Court has also redefined the conditions for the legal rectification of sex (Case 15138/2015).

The analysis of these decisions raises the issue of the importance of gender for the legal institution of family and for personal status, as well as of the complex nature of the legal notion of gender.

Notwithstanding that the Italian Law does not attempt to define the concept of gender, it considers gender as the basis of different disciplines concerning family law, self-determination and personal identity. In this context, the right of every person to define him/herself and to be recognized and respected becomes relevant. These factors affect, among other things, the rules concerning family formation, and the regulation of marriage.

This paper aims to identify the areas of friction within self-determination in relation to the legal rectification of sex. In addition, it analyses the consequences of sex reassignment on Family Law, especially within the legal institution of marriage. Some possible guidelines will be identified for orienting the discussion.

This research, not based on statistical analysis, is empirically founded on ECHR, foreign and national case-law and legal documents, considered in relation to the notion of gender drawn by other disciplines (particularly social sciences and psychiatry).

The last few decades have witnessed profound changes in family forms and the meaning of marriage. These processes are connected with growing numbers of parental divorces and separations. While traditional families were characterized by standardization in family forms and predictability in family transitions, contemporary families are facing a growing amount of unforeseen transitions and greater diversity and complexity in the life paths of family members. Besides unexpected transitions, such as divorce, families encounter several expected transitions, such as a child starting school. Transitions also mean changes in everyday actions, emotions and the form of relations. These processes of differentiation and erosion have a major impact, in particular, on children and young people.

Therefore, in family studies we should deepen our understanding of the everyday practices in which families are engaged, such as doings, moral concerns, emotions, interaction, daily relationships, coordinates of time and space, routines and rules. When focusing on daily life, the researcher faces a methodological question: in what ways, that is, by what methods, can the relevant aspects of daily family life be captured in an ecologically valid way?

In the symposium we concentrate on three new innovative methods combining both textual and visual approaches. These methods are electronic diaries, network maps and life-lines. Diaries create a picture of daily phenomena by providing contemporaneous and detailed information about settings, events and reactions. The purpose of the network map is to gain insight into important social relationships, including the ways in which children and adolescents conceptualize their family relationships. In the life-line method, children are asked to mark on a line of life the most noteworthy turning points in their lives, whether positive or negative.

By what methods children’s life in their daily environments can be captured in an ecologically valid way? A method often used for capturing this kind of everyday life is the diary. Diaries create a picture of daily phenomena by providing contemporaneous and detailed information about settings, events and reactions. In this method, data are collected with repeated measurements during a limited time period, for example a week. Reports are made in close proximity to actual events in the participants’ natural environments. Recently, diary methods have been a focus of intensive development. Different forms of electronic diaries have replaced or at least complemented traditional paper-and-pencil diaries. Research methods employing the new technology may be found especially interesting by adolescents and children. Family Research Centre, University of Jyväskylä has contributed to this development work by creating a new tool, the mobile diary, for the study of everyday life (e.g. Rönkä et al., 2010 & 2015; Malinen et al., 2013; Sevón (forthcoming); Lämsä et al. 2013). In our project “Daily transitions, children in multiple family forms (DALFA)” special emphasis is on inventing methods to capture the everyday activities, daily emotions and social relationships of children living in different family forms with an innovative internet based method using voice and visual material.

Life-lines are said to be a reflexive and participatory method for studying changes, transitions and important life events in families. When studying children, such visual methods can, among other things, help break the ice in the interview and assist the child in memorizing and describing his/her life in a graphic form. In this presentation, I will discuss the use of life-lines as visual methods in a research project with children.

In the EMSE (Children’s emotional security in multiple family relations) -research project conducted in the Family Research Centre and funded by the Academy of Finland, we interviewed and collected life-lines from 44 children, mostly aged 11-13 years. We were interested in children’s perceptions of their family relations, changes that had taken place in these relations during the child’s life and their mood, whether positive or negative, during these transitions. In the beginning of the interview, the child was asked to mark important life-events, transitions and their mood at the time of events into a life-line. The interviewee assisted the child in drawing and marking by asking complementary questions. In the presentation, I will reflect in more detail the experiences, advantages and limitations of the life-line data.

Many changes are affecting the family today, transforming the foundations of self-identity, which are the core models for everyday personal life. The situation of family disruption raises a number of human and social issues which deserve to be better understood. The aim of this paper is to concentrate on the sociological consideration of the various bonds and transitions in children of divorce, with the use of innovative visual methods. This survey being carried out on a sample of young Italian adults, shows in the form of qualitative research the main features of one of these methods, the network maps. The network maps define the structure, the positions of family members and relationships between them, and conceptualize who belongs to a family that has changed. This throws some light on what family relationships, events and representations are on the perception of the person involved. The challenge posed for this visual method is to continue to conceive of individuals in terms of relational approach, through the interdependence with self, others, and the world during the course of life. A great contribution of this tool sui generis is that it opens the door to numerous additional questions that need answers and further research.

The starting point of the presentation is the assumption that experiences and memories – the everyday knowledge – deposits in the form of pictures: We are thinking in pictures. As a methodological consequence, we suggest that visual methods provide an outstanding, more immediate approach to understanding the constructions of everyday life world than verbal data. This is because implicit knowledge has to be more reflected to be presented verbally. An example for an more directly access to this implicit knowledge in private affairs is the use of toy figures and furniture in interviews to allow more practical demonstrations of social structures and social situations within the interview. Of course, this does not mean that verbal data is useless for such type of research, but rather that a huge potential lies in combining and triangulating verbal and visual data and in integrating visual methods into interview situations. This is especially true for research on subjects, which are highly ideologically charged, such as family issues.

Building upon a case study, we aim to explore the configuration in the inner space of one family. By drawing upon different types of pictures (family portraits, montages of everyday family life) as well as verbal data, we aim at working out inconsistencies and gaps between displaying and doing family. The presentation will finally discuss potentials of a combined approach of interviews and visualization techniques in the field of research on family and gender related issue.

Dyadic coping is the way partners cope together against stress and support each other in times of difficulty. Research on dyadic coping has mainly focused on the individual and relational consequences of it and showed that positive dyadic coping responses significantly contribute to partner’s relationship functioning and stability. Research on the specific components of the dyadic coping process and on its correlates, however, has been relatively scarce. One aspect that has only been recently investigated by the dyadic coping research refers to the stress communication component of the process. To what extent the way the partner communicates his/her stress may facilitate or obstacle positive dyadic coping responses by the other partner? To what extent the other’s sensitivity and responsiveness to the partners’ communication of stress does promote positive outcomes of the dyadic coping process? Moreover, several individual and relational processes related to partners’ coping can promote or hinder the dyadic coping process. In particular, individual emotion regulation strategies (e. g., down regulation of negative emotions, emotional intelligence) were found to be associated with positive relationship outcomes as well as with more positivity and less negativity in couples’ interactions. How is individual emotion regulation associated with dyadic coping and ultimately with partners’ relationship satisfaction? Capitalization is a relational process similar to dyadic coping in several respects, but involving partners’ communication about and responses to positive events. How are dyadic coping and capitalization associated? The present symposium will delve into these issues with the aim of adding new knowledge on the dyadic coping process and deriving implication for preventive interventions designed to help couples cope together more effectively.

Dyadic coping - the way couples support each other in times of stress - has emerged as a strong predictor of long-term relationship functioning and stability. The theory of dyadic coping suggests that for providing adequate support, one would need an understanding of the stress-related emotions of the partner. However, research examining the importance of the understanding of the partner's emotions (e.g., being clear about the partner's emotions) on dyadic coping is rare. This study aims to address this gap by investigating the long-term influence of clarity of other people's feelings on dyadic coping. In a sample of 368 couples, clarity of other people's feelings and dyadic coping were measured annually over 3 years. Results suggest that clarity of other people's feelings predicts change in supportive dyadic coping (self and partner evaluation), especially in men. These findings suggest that individual emotional abilities, such as the emotional understanding of others, contribute to adequate dyadic coping.

Romantic couples usually try to provide support when one partner is stressed, but to what extent do couples differ in their sensitivity and responsiveness to the partners’ needs? Promptly reacting might be crucial in explaining differences in relationship outcomes. The central aim of this observational study was to disentangle the temporal dynamics of couple support conversations. The study was conducted with 132 couples of which one of the partners was experimentally stressed. After the stressful experience, couples were secretly videotaped during their reunion. Multilevel analyses were conducted with the intensive longitudinal observational data of the couple conversations. Preliminary results suggest that there is variety in how sensitive and responsive partners react to stress expression, which might also be associated with relationship outcomes. This line of research adds new knowledge on the importance of sensitivity and adequate reactions to the partners’ needs during periods of stress.

Emotion regulation has been related to more positivity and less negativity in couple relationships. Emotion regulation abilities (e. g., down regulation of negative emotions, emotional intelligence) have been associated with positive relationship outcomes (such as relationship satisfaction and constructive communication). The aim of the present research was to investigate the association between husbands and wives’ cognitive conscious emotion regulation strategies, dyadic coping behaviors and marital satisfaction. Using a sample of 295 couples from Romania (590 individuals), we found that adaptive cognitive emotion regulation strategies (putting into perspective, positive refocusing, positive reappraisal and planning refocusing) have been related to positive dyadic coping (supportive, common and delegated coping in couples), which in turn increased both partners’ marital satisfaction. Analyses using actor partner interdependence modeling indicated that dyadic coping mediated the link between spouses’ cognitive emotion regulation and their own marital satisfaction. These findings support the importance of addressing both cognitive coping strategies and dyadic coping in prevention and intervention in couple and family.

Dyadic coping and capitalization processes, although different in several aspects, share conceptual similarities, but they have been rarely studied together and, there is little research on the interplay between these two processes. The aim of the present study is to analyze whether and how partners’ perceptions of the other’s dyadic coping and capitalization responses are correlated. One hundred seventy-five (Mean relationship duration = 18 years) completed two self-report questionnaires (six-months interval) containing scales designed to measure the perception of partner’s capitalization responses, dyadic coping, and relational well-being. Results showed that partners’ dyadic coping and capitalization responses associated so that the more a partner is perceived as positive and supportive during stressful situations the more he/she is also perceived as responsive to the partner’s communication of positive events. Gender differences and implications for intervention are discussed.

Objectives. In our paper, we analyze the association between couples’ relative education and their respective working arrangements in Germany. Theoretically, we draw on two competing perspectives of the effects of education.

On the one hand, education indicates one’s level of resources on the labor market. Thus, the partner with the higher earnings potential is expected to spend more time on the labor market than his partner. Couples with equal educational achievements are expected to share their weekly working hours equally.

On the other hand, education represents the extent of approval to gender egalitarianism. Hence, we hypothesize that higher educated couples show a higher propensity and potential of equality.

Recent research has provided clues for the latter model in other spheres of daily life, questioning the symmetrical approach of the resource perspective.

Method. We use data from the German Microcensus of 2013 to test both models for the case of couples’ employment patterns. Our population of interest contains approximately 70,000 heterosexual German couples (unweighted). We map women's and men's total working hours for each educational constellation.

Results. First regression analyses yield evidence for both theoretical perspectives. The analyses indicate that homogamous couples on a high educational level are more likely to tend to an egalitarian division of paid work than homogamous couples with lower educational attainments (preliminary results).

Conclusions. The paper concludes with discussing the results in the light of changing inequalities in society and sheds a light on possible policy conclusions.

When analyzing the evolution of gender inequalities in household labor division two conflicting approaches are often evidenced: on the one hand, the reduction of the gender gap ("gender convergence" view); on the other, the persistence of inequality ("stalled revolution" view). Currently, most analyses accept the progression towards equality but highlight its limits. In what sense and why gender inequalities in household labor division are decreasing? In order to answer this question, we will present a regression analysis of data on time-distribution of daily activities. This data has been produced through Time-Use Surveys carried out by the Basque Statistics Institute-Eustat every five years (1993-2013) in the region of the Basque Country (Spain) to a sample of 5,000 individuals. The main results show the following trends: 1) it is greater the decrease on time spent by women than the increase of time devoted by men; 2) women are still responsible for most of the core housework; 3) inequalities on care work persist since women and men dedicate more time to these activities nowadays than twenty years ago; and 4) the variables that better explain the dedication to unpaid work are participation in the labor market, educational level and marital status, although their influences are not equivalent on domestic work and care, either for men or women. The results are interpreted under the aegis of three theories that explain the dedication to household labor: time availability, relative resources and gender effect (doing gender).

The engineering profession in Germany is suspected to be traditional, especially with regards to the attribution of gender roles and constructions of career, family and parenthood. Hence the author asks about the processes of construction of parenthood using the example of engineers and explains the effects of their traditional bourgeois professional culture and habitus on the roles and ideas of family and their expectations concerning parenting.

These research questions were investigated by a method mix of qualitative content analysis, biographical method and discourse in a Grounded Theory framework with narrative interviews conducted with engineers in Germany. Main findings are how the professional culture and habitus of engineering structure models of family and parenthood. The results show the choice of career and study subject can be considered a key-factor in biographies to the construction of their professional identity. Based on these decision processes they construct parenting in the context of their employment history, which they maintained the separation of work and family life in a private and public sphere because of their professional habitus and therefore perpetuated the bourgeois gender order. Going on from these findings, the question of generalisation has to be proposed and how these particular experiences can be seen in a wider social context. Furthermore, the repelling or moderating function of families (among German engineers) in regards of societal change processes is in the focus of the presentation.

For Germany, more than 40 percent of all first-time employees enter the labor market based on a fixed-term contract. Although chances for transition into an open end contract during later career-stages are good it is reasonable to assume that working under a fixed-term contract during these formative years severely affects young adults’ life-plans and may delay the consolidation of intimate relationships.

Previous research on the impact of fixed-term employment on intimate relationships is largely limited to family formation. This presentation addresses the question to what extent different degrees of labor market inclusion – being still in education, working under fixed-term contract, working with permanent contract or being unemployed – during young adults’ life courses affect consolidation of intimate relationships. We are looking at four transitions: into cohabitation, into marriage, into parenthood and into home ownership. In contrast to previous research on family formation, we take into account that individuals may perceive fixed-term employment in different ways.

Our results are based on a representative sample of 1,083 German adults aged between 20 and 35 years. As a key-result, our analyses showed that working under a fixed-term contract prolonged time till purchasing a real estate when compared to working under a permanent contract. Furthermore, we found significant interaction effects for time till marriage and time till transitioning into parenthood: the more precarious the perceptions of fixed-term employment, the more the transitions into marriage and into parenthood were delayed.

This paper addresses the shift in practices as well as attitudes, towards a dual earner model in most OECD countries. We study families’ everyday practices and parents’ negotiations and scope of action within a particular welfare state regime, using Norway as a case, Norway has undergone a particularly rapid change in terms of entitlements for working parents. We study how two groups of parents, parents of Norwegian origin and immigrant parents of Polish origin, make use of and make sense of the structures available to working parents in Norway. The study draws on qualitative interviews with Norwegian and Polish parents of children below school age.

We find that both groups embrace and make use of the available entitlements, but their scope of action seems to differ. For the Norwegian parents, the dual earne – dual carer model has become internalized as a moral obligation and part of identity, which is related to a particular work–family arrangement. Even minor deviations from the ideal of sharing equally led to ambivalence and feelings of (mild) shame. For the Polish parents, the Norwegian entitlements for working parents is basically seen as an enabling structure, which can be actively used to shape their new lives in Norway, including renegotiating gender relations in the family. They take a more pragmatic view on which kind of work–family arrangement is suitable in a given situation, and they do not seem to share the moral obligation to live up to a particular model of the gender equal couple.

Social norms (e.g., Stein et al., 1998) and reciprocity (Klaus, 2009) have been shown to predict support behavior of adults towards their parents. Therefore it is assumed that both generate an individual feeling of obligation to support. Embedded in the model of intergenerational solidarity (Bengtson & Roberts, 1991) the associations for social norms, received support by parents and individual feelings of obligation with given support especially emotional as well as instrumental, to parents by adults were tested. Also, the mediating function of feelings of obligation was tested.

The analysis is based on data from a German sample. Participants responded to a standardized self-report questionnaire to two measurement points at an interval of twelve months. The 172 females and 53 males were aged between 22 years and 51 years. 209 responded in regard to their mothers, whereas 186 provided information concerning their fathers. Of these 177 participants answered for both parents.

A differentiated view on gender displayed that adult children felt more obligated and supported their mothers more than they supported fathers. The analysis showed associations for support given by adult children with received support by parents and feelings of obligation. Felt obligation mediated the associations for social norms as well as received support by parents and emotional as well as instrumental support. Differences in the prediction of support for mothers and fathers were not observed.

All across Europe informal home care is provided between partners. Partner caregivers, however, experience an especially burdensome situation since such care is often not only very intense but also linked to losing the partner as confidant.

Different support policies have been established to prevent informal caregivers from social deprivation. It is an important open question how effective these policies are in reducing negative impacts of caregiving on informal caregivers’ health and wellbeing. The objective of this study is to find out how the provision of long-term care (LTC) in a specific region is linked with the quality of life, loneliness, and depression of spousal caregivers.

We apply a multilevel design with data from more than 24.000 Europeans nested in 130 European regions. Individual data is taken from the SHARE study (Wave 5 release 1) and regional macro indicators were retrieved from the OECD and national statistical offices. We find that caregivers state a lower quality of life, they feel lonelier and have higher levels of depression also when controlling for socio-economic factors. The complementary utilization of formal LTC goes along with reduced burden for the caregiver. When including a cross-level interaction we additionally find evidence that the number of LTC beds in a region is positively linked with quality of life and mental health of caregivers, signaling that caregiver burden is reduced by the availability of LTC beds.

Recent studies on desires to have children mostly focus on women whereas research describes, that more men remain childless today than women. Research that analyses men and their tendency to become a father shows, that men’s decisions are very much influenced by the circumstances, like a stable relationship, financial resources and the ‘right age’ to become a father (Zerle-Elsäßer 2015). In a DFG-funded research project (“Wege in die Elternschaft”) we conducted interviews with 24 heterosexual couples (interviews with the individual partners and partner-interviews) which are analyzed for this paper with a focus on gender- and masculinity issues. All couples are either expecting a child or became parents within the last year. (First) Results show that the desire to have children is strongly interconnected with the images of fatherhood the interviewees have – and these are interconnected with their constructions of masculinity. While men who orientate mostly on an institutionalized biography and hegemonic masculinity (Connell), see children as a ‘normal’ and thus unquestioned part of their lives, men who orientate on “alternative masculinity concepts” (Buschmeyer 2013/Buschmeyer&Lengersdorf 2016) discuss the possibility to have children ambivalently. Alternative concepts of masculinity and fatherhood often include questioning their expectations towards becoming a father: these men wish to spend time with their children and they want to be different from their own fathers. Sometimes they report, they felt the expectations were too high and they doubted if they want to have children at all.

keywords:

gender role, partnership, desire to have a child; bargaining process, panel study, dyadic analysis

There is no reason to doubt that usually the decision process towards having a further child is taken within partnerships. However less is known about the interaction processes itself. It is undisputed that both partners’ socio-economic attributes have an impact on decision making, even though few is known about the strength of these mutual influences.

Not only that the effect sizes remain uncertain but also one does not know whether females and males attributes, measured on the individual level, have the same impact as they have on the couple’s level. Furthermore one must be aware that the dispositions towards having a further child are likely to vary over time. Considering this fact the negotiating process towards the final decision is as likely to be a short- or a long-term process.

Longitudinal dyadic modelling appears to be a promising effort in trying to close the knowledge gaps. Two different models will be developed to take into account the fact that the decision making process varies in time.

Results of the analyses show that on the pair level male partner’s influences are as relevant and strong as female’s influences although in comparison with analyses of family foundation different attributes become relevant. Furthermore the probability of the decision of having a second child is likely than decisions of having more children.

Many studies have focused on the family background of young parents, but we know less about their life situations. Were they studying, working or doing something else? Did they live with their parents or alone and what kind of relationship they had with the child’s other biological parent? The aim of this presentation is to examine Finnish young parents’ life situations at the beginning of pregnancy. The paper will have a look, are there any differences between mothers and fathers and between those who have been underage and older.

The presentation is part of an on-going PhD research project and is based on survey data (N=309; 72 % women and 28 % men; mean age 26,9). The Finnish-speaking young parents, born in 1978-1994 and have had their firstborn under the age of 20, were reached by using the stratified sampling of the whole Finnish population. The survey was conducted in February 2013.

The preliminary results show that the most of the young mothers and fathers were students at the beginning of pregnancy and older parents worked more often than younger. Most young parents had the steady relationship: most of the 18-19 years old lived together with their child’s other parent and over 40 % of the underage has been dating for more than half a year. Most underage lived in their childhood home but over 20 % of them had moved away from home. More results of the life situations will be presented and their significance is discussed.

Leaving the parental home, entering a relationship and starting a family are important events for young people on their transition into adulthood. These private life-course events are prerequisites for breaking away from the family and consequently becoming independent members of society. They present new challenges for adolescents and young adults because they have to assume greater responsibility for themselves as well as for their children (du Bois-Reymond, 2013).

Referring to the theory of developmental tasks (Havighurst, 1972 [1981]; Hurrelmann & Quenzel, 2012) we argue that in times of uncertainty and individualized life courses (Beck, 2009; Macmillan, 2005) especially labor-market entry has become highly unsteady and fragile, so that it is not perceived to be the crucial transition marker into adulthood. Otherwise private life-course events are much more important even though they have also changed (e.g. in terms of meaning, timing, motives). The presentation takes up findings from the Luxembourgish Youth Report 2015 that is based on both quantitative and qualitative data analysis (Willems, 2015).

Qualitative data have shown that some young people associate with adulthood much more than the achievement of the traditional markers (entering into the labor-market, leaving the parental home and starting a family). Becoming adult is rather related to a general change of lifestyle, the development of independency and the assumption of responsibility. For most of the young people taking over responsibility for its own life and behavior as well as for others is of high importance and closely related to their concept of adulthood.