This study examines how partnership change, childbearing, and residential mobility differ between immigrants, their descendants, and the native population in France using a holistic life course approach. We apply competing-risks event history models to longitudinal administrative data from the French Permanent Demographic Sample. We study three life course domains simultaneously for those aged 16–45 between 2012 and 2019. First, we estimate the overall intensity of experiencing any life event. Second, we compare the propensity of births, partnership changes, and residential relocations within a unified competing-risks framework, enabling direct comparison across events, generations, and origin groups. The results show that immigrants experience fewer life course events than natives, while their descendants exhibit higher intensities than immigrants but remain below native levels. Residential relocation is the most common transition across all groups; however, immigrants and their descendants are consistently less mobile than natives, with limited convergence across generations. Fertility displays strong origin-specific differences: immigrants from North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, and Turkey have elevated birth rates that decline substantially in the second generation, though fertility remains slightly higher among individuals of Turkish and North African origin. Partnership dynamics show convergence across generations, with most second-generation groups resembling natives. Overall, the findings point to partial behavioural assimilation, revealing that social integration is likely influenced by cultural norms and structural constraints.
Background Loneliness is increasingly recognized as a major social and public health issue, yet theoretical approaches remain fragmented across disciplines. Psychological research has primarily emphasized individual vulnerabilities and coping, public health perspectives have focused on morbidity and functioning, while sociological work has highlighted structural, institutional, and cultural conditions. This article introduces an integrative loneliness framework that connects these perspectives by explicitly linking micro-, meso-, and macro-level processes across the life course. Methods Building on and extending existing conceptual models and empirical findings from psychology, sociology, public health, and life-course research, we develop a model of contextual pathways and cross-level mechanisms that jointly explain loneliness within and across life stages. Results The Life-course And Multilevel Psychosocial theoretical framework of Loneliness (LAMP) conceptualizes loneliness as a dynamic outcome of interactions between structural conditions, cultural contexts, and linked lives, and individual resources and vulnerabilities. The framework identifies key macro–meso, macro–micro, and meso–micro mechanisms and specifies how inequality, cultural normativity, and the timing of life-course transitions shape trajectories of risk, resilience, and change in loneliness. Discussion By moving beyond discipline-specific and single-level explanations, the LAMP framework provides a distinctive integrative account of how structural, cultural, relational, and individual processes interact across the life course to shape loneliness. The model provides a conceptual foundation for comparative, longitudinal, and policy-oriented research and offers clear guidance for empirically examining how multilevel contextual forces jointly produce and mitigate loneliness over the life course.
In this study we investigate the influence of adult children's adverse labour market experiences on the mental health of their ageing parents. Taking a life course perspective, we examine the trajectory of adult children over nearly a decade following graduation from a school or university.We utilise data from Swedish registers linked to the Västerbotten Intervention Programme (VIP), a survey that provides detailed information about health outcomes in northern Sweden. We utilise sequence analysis and cluster analysis to categorise labour market trajectories of adult children. Next, we use linear regression models to examine how labour market trajectories of adult children are associated with parental mental health measured in VIP.We find that labour market trajectories indicating more persistent forms of labour market disadvantage are associated with poorer mental health among parents compared to trajectories characterised by stable employment or those involving only short periods of unemployment on the way to finding a job. We also find poorer mental health among parents with children who were born late in parents’ lives, and who only started to settle down on the labour market during the period observed in our analysis. This suggests that parental uncertainty about children’s economic security matters for mental health in the older generation.
Researchers have long argued that unemployment affects the mental health of both, individuals and their partners, but findings remain inconsistent. Evidence on job insecurity is even scarcer, despite its widespread occurrence. This study tracks shifts in mental health related to unemployment and job insecurity in couples, testing for gender and educational differences. We analyzed data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (v39.1, years 2002-2022) covering working-age economically active heterosexual cohabiting couples observed without gaps over a nine-year period (five biennial waves, N = 2244 dyads). Mental health was measured using the SF-12 scale. Our Longitudinal Actor-Partner Interdependence Model (L-APIM) controlled for residual correlation between partner's health. Our results showed that own unemployment and inactivity correlated with worsening of mental health among men and women. Partner effects were also negative but substantially smaller than actor effects, significant only for women and only in some analytical samples. Inspection of educational differences showed significant partner effects only among lower-educated women; they were especially pronounced in couples where the man, but not the woman, had tertiary education. Our findings indicate no partner effects among men, while weak partner effects among women cannot be ruled out. The results also point to an intersection of gender and economic vulnerability as key drivers of observed patterns.
Based on chronic stress theory, this study explores the effect of separation on parental mental health, operationalized over the State-Trait Depression Scale (STDS). It investigates depression trajectories surrounding separation and examines how patterns differ by the conflict level during separation. Data comes from the German Family Panel pairfam (N = 2779 partnered and 633 separated parents). The analysis spans the period from two years before to two years after separation and draws on fixed-effects regression models with dynamic treatment effects. Results show that depression trajectories are strongly shaped by pre-separation conflict levels. Parents who experience more amicable separations typically show an increase in depression scores around the time of the separation-suggesting separation acts as a short-term stressor. In contrast, those who go through high-conflict separations tend to exhibit elevated levels of depression in the years leading up to the separation but show improvement afterward. In such cases, union dissolution can be a pathway to improved mental well-being. Overall, the findings demonstrate that the mental health consequences of separation cannot be understood without considering the separation process itself. They highlight that depression trajectories are shaped by pre-separation conflict and underscore the importance of viewing separation as a dynamic life-course transition rather than a discrete event.
