Pooling all incomes was long seen as the norm in male-breadwinner marriages, but in a time of dual-earner families, cohabitation, and divorce, the underpinnings of this model are eroding. What consequences does this have for income pooling? We compare ca. 130,000 married and cohabiting couples from 29 European countries in the 2010 European Union Survey of Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) via random effects logit models. We show that cohabiting couples are generally more likely than married couples to keep at least some income separately, the so-called cohabitation gap. Roughly a fifth of this gap we can attribute to compositional differences between married and cohabiting couples. Further, the cohabiting group is heterogeneous and smaller when comparing only couples with children or only couples with a long relationship duration. Lastly, we show that there is substantial variation in the size of the cohabitation gap across countries. The size of this gap varies with the country-specific cohabitation rate, divorce rate, and female labor force participation rate. While there is considerable heterogeneity among cohabiting couples, married and cohabiting couples remain distinct in their resource-sharing behavior. Income pooling does not become more comparable when cohabitation, marital instability, and women’s economic independence become more widespread in the broader society. Our study reconciles disparate findings of previous cross-national research on the cohabitation gap.

Research on climate change has examined risk perceptions, emotional distress, and support for mitigation policies, while research on perceived intergenerational mobility has focused primarily on economic and structural determinants of whether people feel better or worse off than their parents. Much less is known about whether climate-related concerns also shape these intergenerational self-assessments. Using original survey data from the United Kingdom, Germany, and Sweden, this study investigates whether climate change concerns, measured through climate worry, daily-life impact, and reduced opportunity, are associated with perceived changes in social position relative to one's parents. We distinguish between general life evaluations and perceptions of socioeconomic mobility. Results show that individuals who feel that climate change negatively affects their daily life or future opportunities are more likely to report being downwardly mobile, particularly when reflecting on their life more broadly rather than in strictly socioeconomic terms. These relationships are strongest in the United Kingdom and weakest in Sweden. We find limited evidence that the relationship between climate concerns and mobility perceptions differs systematically across birth cohorts, education, or gender. These findings contribute to emerging scholarship linking environmental disruption with subjective well-being, social identity, and perceptions of intergenerational fairness by showing that climate change matters not only for environmental attitudes and distress, but also for how individuals evaluate generational progress and decline in their own lives.

Can large-scale geopolitical shocks causally reshape how individuals perceive their intergenerational mobility? War unsettles everyday life through security fears, policy uncertainty, inflation, and energy shocks---factors that can recalibrate the benchmarks people use when comparing their lives to their parents'. We address this question by examining the immediate impact of Russia's invasion of Ukraine on mobility perceptions using a quasi-experimental design. Leveraging World Values Survey fieldwork occurring in Czechia and Uruguay around Russia's invasion of Ukraine, we compare respondents interviewed immediately before and after February~24, 2022 within an unexpected event during survey design. Using the quasi-random interview dates around the invasion, we find consistent null effects across multiple specifications---including bandwidth sensitivity analyses, logit models, robust bias-corrected estimates, demographic controls, and placebo tests. The invasion produced no discernible immediate impact on either upward or downward mobility perceptions in either country, despite Czechia's geographic proximity and historical ties to the region. These findings complement prior correlational evidence showing associations between war concerns and mobility beliefs one year after the invasion, suggesting that such effects may unfold gradually rather than instantaneously, or that correlational patterns reflect selection into worry rather than immediate causal impacts. By establishing a causal upper bound on the immediate effect of invasion exposure on mobility perceptions, our findings constrain the plausible magnitude of causal effects in a literature built primarily on observational evidence.

As populations age and informal caregiving becomes more widespread, the health consequences of providing care are becoming a key concern for societies. Sociological theories of stress appraisal and role strain posit detrimental consequences to the health and wellbeing of caregivers. Conversely, role enhancement theory holds that caregiving can have positive health consequences. Using data from the English Longitudinal Study of Aging (ELSA) collected among adults aged 50 years or older with a follow-up period of up to 20 years (2002-23, N ca. 20,000 persons), we examine associations between transitions into and out of caregiving, and two key health outcomes which have been understudied as consequences of caregiving, namely: allostatic load and cognitive functioning. We estimate asymmetric fixed-effects models which model changes in health outcomes as a function of transitions into and out of caregiving while accounting for unobserved between-person heterogeneity. Our results show that caregiving is associated with better cognitive health for both men and women, but not with improved biomarker-based allostatic load. Results do not differ by caregiving intensity, irrespective of which amount of time is defined as intense caregiving. Our findings provide support for role enhancement theory, suggesting that caregivers benefit in terms of cognitive functioning, even if a biomarker-based approach to measuring stress-related health outcome does not corroborate an overall health benefit. We formulate implications for policy-making and directions for future research.

As we mark the end of our third year as editors of European Societies, we witness a significant transition: the journal has now changed publishers, moving from Taylor & Francis to MIT Press. This moment of change provides an excellent opportunity to reflect on the journal’s development and achievements over the past three years, considering both the progress made and the direction we envision for the future.

Research on intergenerational mobility has traditionally focused on objective markers of socioeconomic position. In this study, we argue that the subjective aspects of intergenerational mobility deserve greater attention and empirically explore what individuals report they compare when they gauge their intergenerational mobility trajectories. Drawing on representative survey data from Germany, Sweden, and the United Kingdom, as well as machine-learning-driven text analyses of open-ended survey responses, we reveal that, in addition to conventional measures of intergenerational mobility, such as education, occupational status, and income, individuals consider a diverse array of factors, including family life, home ownership, and lifestyle choices. Our findings highlight the heterogeneity of these comparisons across different countries, genders, and generations. We identify significant variations in the dimensions of intergenerational comparisons, such as the prominence of education in Sweden, the focus on housing in the United Kingdom, and the salience of freedom, opportunity, and lifestyle in Germany. Furthermore, gender differences reveal that females are more likely to emphasize education and family life, while males focus on income and occupational status. These insights provide a deeper understanding of the subjective dimensions of intergenerational mobility and contribute to ongoing debates in social stratification research and general social theory.

Estimates of intergenerational educational mobility are generally computed using a combination of self- and proxy-reports of one's and one's parents' education. Such reports are easily collected, offering a cost-effective alternative to collecting multiple self-reports or register data. However, the bias that proxy-reports could introduce in the measurement of intergenerational educational mobility is rarely assessed. Our study fills this gap and assesses how reliable people are when they report their parents' or their child's educational attainment. We find that both parents and children tend to underestimate the educational distance between themselves and their family members, thus inflating estimates of educational reproduction. This trend is larger when children act as proxy-reporters. Another limitation of using children’s proxy-reported information is the number of missing answers, which is lower when parents are asked to proxy-report their child's education. In a simulation exercise, we establish that the bias introduced by proxy reports is not negligible, with self-reported intergenerational regression coefficients being 16\% higher when a proxy-report is used.

Whilst cognitive decline is often assumed to be an inevitable part of old age, plenty of studies document its heterogeneity, with many older people showing high functioning and resilience to decline. Lower socioeconomic status is a known risk factor for cognitive decline. This study links the theoretical ideas of cognitive reserve to psychosocial theory and intersectionality to propose that combinations of demographic factors better define lived experiences of social position than individual categories for understanding patterns of cognitive function over time. We use 10 waves from the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (ELSA), spanning 2002-2023, and operationalise cognitive ageing with repeated measures of episodic memory. We examine the intersectional effects of sex, birth cohort, own social class, and parents' social class using Multilevel Analysis of Individual Heterogeneity and Discriminatory Accuracy (MAIHDA) modelling. The results show women have better episodic memory scores than men, there is a gradient by social class, and parental social class exerts an influence on cognition over and above own class. The 'intersections' with the lowest cognition scores include those multiply disadvantaged, such as working-class women from lower-class backgrounds, and the downwardly mobile. Examination of pairs of interactions show that social class exerts stronger interactive effects than sex or cohort (having controlled for age). However, the variance components analysis from the model shows little evidence of significant intersectionality, and thus suggests that the effects of sex, birth cohort, own social class, and parents' social class are additive rather than multiplicative.

Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 was a watershed moment in modern European history. It quickly became evident that the war would have significant consequences for Europe's security, politics, and economy. Ukraine is shaken by the invasion to an extent comparable to the devastation during the Second World War. As Editors of European Societies, we realized that there was little sociological research on Ukraine, one of the largest European countries. Only a handful of articles were ever published on Ukraine in European Societies or other leading general sociological journals. Thus, we initiated a Special Issue on ‘Understanding Ukrainian Society Before and After the Russian Invasion,’ co-edited by two Ukrainian sociologists, Tamara Martsenyuk from the National University of Kyiv Mohyla Academy and Tymofii Brik from Kyiv Schools of Economics.

In this study, we shed light on the social consequences the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 has had in other European countries. We argue that positive perceptions of one's intergenerational mobility are linked with political and economic stability and that the war can thus be expected to impact intergenerational mobility perceptions. We test our pre-registered hypothesis with representative survey data from three European countries, the United Kingdom, Germany, and Sweden, which were significantly affected by the ongoing war. Our results show that individuals' war-related concerns in all countries are divided into proximal and distal concerns. In turn, proximal concerns go along with greater perceived downward and less perceived upward mobility in the United Kingdom and Germany. We interpret these findings by calling for expanding the horizons of intergenerational mobility research by incorporating areas of life other than socio-economic position.

The sibling correlation (SC) estimates the total effect of family background, or 'social origins,' and may be interpreted as measuring a society’s inequality of opportunity. Its sensitivity to both observed and unobserved factors makes it an all-encompassing measure and an attractive choice for comparative research. We gather and summarise all available estimates of SCs in educational attainment (M = .46, SD = .09), before employing meta-regression to explore variability in these estimates. First, we find significantly lower SCs in Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Denmark than the US, with US correlations on the order of 0.1 -- or 25% -- higher. Most of the other (primarily European) countries for which we find estimates fall in between. Second, we find a novel Great Gatsby Curve-type positive association between income inequality in childhood and the SC, both cross-nationally and within countries over time. This supports theoretical accounts of the Great Gatsby Curve that emphasize the role of educational inequality as a link between economic inequality and social immobility, and implies that greater equality of educational opportunity likely requires a reduction in economic inequality. Additionally, we find that correlations between sisters are modestly higher on average, and we find no overall differences between cohorts.

Objectives: Subjective social status is a known antecedent for many health outcomes, but little research has examined the association between subjective status and frailty among older people. Using longitudinal data, the goal of this study was firstly, to identify latent trajectories of frailty over time, and secondly, to investigate the relationship between subjective social status and frailty trajectory.Methods: Data were drawn from the 2002–2019 surveys of the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (ELSA), involving 9,484 individuals aged 50+ at baseline. Group-based trajectory models were used to identify trajectories of frailty over the eighteen-year period, and multinomial regression models were used to investigate the relationship between subjective social status and frailty trajectory membership. Controls were included for confounding factors including a range of socioeconomic indicators and health behaviors. Results: Four trajectories of frailty index were retained: Low frailty (53% of participants), Progressive mild frailty (25%), Progressive moderate frailty (15%), and High frailty (6%). We find that higher subjective social status is associated with higher odds of being in the low frailty group and lower odds of being in one of the progressive or high frailty groups. Conclusions: Subjective social status is significantly associated with being in a milder frailty trajectories after controlling for age, health behaviors, and a wide range of objective socioeconomic status markers.

Objectives This study aims to understand the association of life-course intergenerational social mobility with allostatic load (AL) burden in midlife and older ages in Ireland. Methods The study involved biological data for 3,987 older adults participating in The Irish Longitudinal Study on Ageing (TILDA). Intergenerational social mobility was characterized using the cross-classification of origin socioeconomic position (SEP; i.e., father's occupation) and destination SEP (i.e., own occupation). AL was operationalized using 12 biomarkers tapping cardiovascular, metabolic, renal, and immune system dysregulation. Diagonal reference modeling (DRM) and ordinary least square regression techniques were applied to explore the effect of social mobility on AL burden. Results A total of 55.5% experienced intergenerational mobility: 37.5% were upwardly mobile, 18.0% were downwardly mobile. A social gradient in AL was observed among the socially non-mobile. Destination SEP (b = 0.74, 95% CI = 0.57, 0.92) predominated in influence over origin, although both life stages exerted significant influence on later-life AL. Social mobility in either direction was not associated with AL burden. Mobility coefficients were substantially small across a large variety of model specifications. Discussion Findings provide evidence for an accumulation model of social inequalities in which disparities in health are diluted rather than increased by social mobility (i.e., gradient constraint), with the socially mobile having an AL score that is intermediate between their origin class and destination class. This implies that the effects of origin SEP on health are not immutable, but are instead responsive to changing socioeconomic circumstances across the life course.

Working conditions refer to an individual’s working environment as well as terms andconditions of employment. This covers various aspects, such as working time, task autonomy, pay, career prospects, work-life balance, type of contract, safety and wellbeing. This chapter gives an overview over working conditions in Europe.

Parents with better-educated children are healthier and live longer, but whether there is a causal effect of children's education on their parents' health and longevity is unclear. First, we demonstrate an association between adults' offspring education and parental mortality in the 1958 British birth cohort study, which remains substantial-about two additional years of life-even when comparing parents with similar socioeconomic status. Second, we use the 1972 educational reform in England and Wales, which increased the minimum school leaving age from 15 to 16 years, to identify the presence of a causal effect of children's education on parental health and longevity using census-linked data from the Office for National Statistics Longitudinal Study. Results reveal that children's education has no causal effects on a wide range of parental mortality and health outcomes. We interpret these findings discussing the role of universal health care and education for socioeconomic inequality in Great Britain.

BACKGROUND Subjective social status has a known association with health, whereby better health outcomes are observed for those with higher perceived status. In this research, we offer new evidence on the status-health relationship using a rigorous methodological approach that considers both observed and unobserved confounders. METHODS We use 5 waves of data spanning 15 years from the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing and derive a measure of allostatic load with biomarkers as an objective measure of health. We apply 'within-between' panel regression models. RESULTS Models reveal the expected association between subjective status and health when comparing participants (the 'between' estimate), but no association when examining temporal variation within participants (the 'within' estimate). When controlling for personality traits including optimism, and parental education, the 'between' association between subjective status and allostatic load is reduced but does not disappear. CONCLUSIONS Person-level confounders play some role in explaining the observed link between subjective status and health. The exact nature of the link, including the role of psychological pathways and early-life confounders, remains a question for future research.

Whether labor market competition is shaping anti-immigration attitudes is a contentious issue. We conduct a novel test of ethnic competition theory by comparing the attitudes towards immigration of workers with fixed-term contracts to those with permanent jobs in Europe. Fixed-term contract workers are particularly at risk of competition as they have to compete for jobs in the foreseeable future. In the first step of our investigation, we analyze cross-sectional data (ESS, 2002–18) from 18 Western European countries. We find that—contrary to our expectation—fixed-term workers are less anti-immigration. The effect is substantively small. In the second step, we use a fixed-effects design with longitudinal data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP, 1999–2015) to rule out time-constant unobserved heterogeneity. We find that transitioning from a fixed- to a permanent contract does not affect anti-immigration attitudes. Our combined results thus add to the evidence against labor market competition as an explanation of anti-immigrant attitudes.

Higher subjective socio-economic status (SES) goes along with better self-rated health: This finding is well -established in the literature, yet the majority of studies it is based on only rely on cross-sectional analyses and only account for few potential confounders of the association. Particularly wealth, which is increasingly thought of as an important dimension of accumulated advantage, is only rarely examined as a confounder. Using eight waves of panel data from the English Longitudinal Study of Aging (ELSA, 2002-19), we investigate the association between subjective SES and self-rated health. We use random effects models that account for theoretically important time-constant (such as education and social class) and time-varying confounders (such as income and wealth) as well as fixed-effects models, that in addition control for all time-constant confounders, whether observed or unobserved. The fully adjusted fixed-effects model reveals a statistically significant association between subjective SES and self-rated health. Yet, a one-point increase on the subjective SES ladder goes along with a two per cent of a standard deviation increase in self-rated health, only around a quarter of the size of the random-effects estimate. The role of wealth for the subjective SES-self-rated health association is negligible in the fixed-effects specifications. Smoking, drinking, and physical activity do not appear to mediate the association. A substantial part, though not all, of the observed association between subjective SES and self-rated health is due to unobserved confounding rather than a causal effect. Reducing health inequalities based on objective SES is likely more effective than based on subjective SES.

Conspiracy theories jeopardize public health by disseminating misinformation and undermining authoritative health guidelines. This study explores social factors associated with the belief in conspiracy theories in Spain during the COVID-19 pandemic. Drawing upon the theoretical framework of Max Weber, it posits that beliefs in conspiracy theories are linked to both instrumental rationality considerations, such as trust in health authorities, science, and pharmaceutical companies, as well as value-rationality based factors, such as ideological orientation. The study analyzes recent, nationally representative survey data and is the first to examine the social predictors of belief in conspiracy theories in Spain during the pandemic. The findings highlight that conspiracy theory beliefs are (a) associated with considerably worse vaccination behaviors, (b) not or only very weakly associated with standard demographics such as age, sex, or education, (c) related to instrumental rationality considerations, and (d) only weakly related to value-rationality indicators such as ideological and religious affiliations. In conclusion, the study underscores the significance of public health policies that specifically address conspiracy theory convictions, and to that end, advocates for the application of a Weberian sociological perspective to better understand the diverse rationalities underlying these beliefs, particularly in the absence of discernible demographic predictors.

Social theory has long predicted that social mobility, in particular downward social mobility, is detrimental to the wellbeing of individuals. Dissociative and ‘falling from grace’ theories suggest that mobility is stressful due to the weakening of social ties, feelings of alienation, and loss of status. In light of these theories, it is a puzzle that the majority of quantitative studies in this area have shown null results. Our approach to resolve the puzzle is twofold. First, we argue for a broader conception of the mobility process than is often used and thus focus on intragenerational occupational class mobility rather than restricting ourselves to the more commonly studied intergenerational mobility. Second, we argue that self-reported measures may be biased by habituation (or ‘entrenched deprivation’). Using nurse-collected health and biomarker data from the UK Household Longitudinal Study (UKHLS, 2010–12, N = 4,123), we derive a measure of allostatic load as an objective gauge of physiological ‘wear and tear,’ and compare patterns of mobility effects with self-reports of health using diagonal reference models. Our findings indicate a strong class gradient in both allostatic load and self-rated health, and that both first and current job matter for current wellbeing outcomes. However, in terms of the effects of mobility itself, we find that intragenerational social mobility is consequential for allostatic load, but not for self-rated health. Downward mobility is detrimental and upward mobility beneficial for wellbeing as assessed by allostatic load. Thus, these findings do not support the idea of generalized stress from dissociation, but they do support the ‘falling from grace’ hypothesis of negative downward mobility effects. Our findings have a further implication, namely that the differences in mobility effects between the objective and subjective outcome infer the presence of entrenched deprivation. Null results in studies of self-rated outcomes may therefore be a methodological artifact, rather than an outright rejection of decades-old social theory.