Suchergebnisse

Reflection on recent developments in the re-use of archived interview data was initiated by drawing on the experience of working on two very different projects: 'Overseas-trained doctors and the development of geriatric medicine' and 'The oldest generation', one of the Timescapes projects. These two projects, run in parallel but independent of one another, were very different in focus, but both explored the practice of re-use. This article draws out insights acquired and lessons learned. However, by taking a longer reflective view, an engagement with secondary analysis emerges much earlier. The article draws on examples from the author's own research history, describing how re-engagement with an earlier re-user of her data reveals continuing academic controversies.

This article is based on data gathered in the 1960s, which included information on household composition and family formations. We explore different family formations and structures represented in this data and the meaning attached to issues around a number of 'unusual' family compositions encountered by the researchers at that time. We also examine the significance attached to atypical family units by both the respondents and the interviewers.

This Open Space section presents exemplars of qualitative secondary analysis in practice along with discussion of the challenges of, and strategies for, conducting such analysis. The articles share an historical as well as sociological dimension in their focus. Two of them centre on aspects of change in familial and intergenerational relationships, and the wider societal contexts in which these are shaped. Throughout, the articles examine questions of secondary analytic method alongside substantive and conceptual puzzles.

This article examines the changing texture of intergenerational relationships in Ireland. Focusing on the young child as 'anchor' generation, we traced changes in the quality and significance of grandchild–grandparent relationships across four birth cohorts, through a secondary analysis of two major qualitative longitudinal datasets made available by the Irish Qualitative Data Archive. The article describes how we addressed the challenges associated with bringing these datasets into dialogue.

This article describes findings from a project that explored what happens to people with dementia (PWDs) following discharge from a general hospital to a residential care home. In 15 out of 109 cases referred to a hospital psychiatric liaison team, admission to a residential care home was indicated during the hospital stay. This 'last resort' for families, following repeated hospital admissions and a deteriorating condition, was accepted when all involved agreed that it was in the best interests of the PWDs. Four months after the move, carers reflected on their criteria for choosing the home, their expectations and whether these were met. Carers' own wellbeing improved and their mental distress reduced as the PWDs appeared settled and safer. However, the findings suggest a continuing key role for family carers of PWDs in care homes and emphasises the need for advocacy for PWDs without such support.

This article examines how images of childhood are displayed in generational relations in television commercials. The data comprise 104 commercials shown on Finnish television in winter 2005 (N = 174 child performers). Generational structuring is seen as a dynamic cultural process, where the concept of 'adulthood' is described through the concept of 'childhood' and the concept of 'childhood' is defined through the concept of 'adulthood'. This notion is used to study the positions constructed for children in the audiovisual data and how these relate to other people present in the commercials. The most popular combinations in the commercials were the child as a fully independent agent in a child-centric construction, or the child as an authenticator complementing the family and adulthood. The images ranged from an obedient to a lively child, and mental activity, creativity, learning abilities and gendered stereotypes were contrasted with elements of neediness.

This article explores parenting support as a field of social policy in Europe by comparing developments in England, France, Germany and Italy. The results suggest cross-national diversity and a need to differentiate between parental support for more general family purposes and measures oriented to teach parents particular skills in childraising. Comparatively, England has by far the most extensive architecture of services to engage with parents and is set apart from the other countries also in terms of the extent to which 'support' means intervention to (re) skill or (re)train parents through standardised parenting programmes. Elsewhere, 'support' has deeper roots in education for family and social life and interventions tend to be more tailored and home-grown. However, despite varying philosophies of child and family welfare, they all show evidence of a move in the direction of greater state engagement with how parents rear their children and their competence in this role.

The focus of this article is on individual case studies selected for the purpose of illuminating the experiences of post-accession Polish migrant 'family lives' in the United Kingdom (UK). These case studies demonstrate what Morgan (1996) calls the movement of individuals through households and family relationships, simultaneous with the examination of the enlargement of the spaces in which family lives are conducted as a consequence of movement across the 'open borders' between the UK and Poland (Ryan, 2010). The focus is on how the interviewees' articulated what they presented to us as the impact of particular structural constraints (in terms of education, pensions, childcare and employment) on their future plans to settle in the UK or return to Poland. However, the main focus of the article is the relationship between these structural constraints and the tensions associated with fulfilling competing familial obligations in the UK and in Poland.

Recent research suggests that global ideologies of love are shaping marriage practices the world over. In this article I compare the narratives of young (20- to 30-year-old), middle-class Gujarati Indians in the United Kingdom (UK) and India, to examine how these ideals are lived out in two very different contexts. In India, heterosexual monogamous marriage arranged with parental consent emerged as the only legitimate modern form of intimate relations due to a complex conjunction of romantic ideologies and 'traditional' familial marriage preferences. In the UK, participants distanced themselves from any sense of 'arrangement' in their relationships, which seemed to call into question for them the veracity of their love. The social context of the UK both supports and facilitates self-selected 'love marriage' among young people, while the converse is true in India. Global ideologies of romantic love are pervasive, but they are interpreted by individuals within local understandings of appropriate marriage and relationships.

Child protection practice and law in the United Kingdom (UK) and North America is almost unique in the world with regard to the ability of courts to override the objections of natural parents to the adoption of their children. This controversial legal outcome is known as forced adoption. There is strong pressure from government in the UK for more children to be removed from the care of their parents and to be quickly placed with adoptive parents. This article presents a critical review of specific research that is relied on to justify drastic limitation on contact between natural parents and separated infants during the care proceedings process. It is argued that such restrictions are not neutral, and instead act to promote a fait accompli of forced adoption.

Childhood obesity is identified as a key public health challenge. Women have been made responsible for this new aspect of 'good' child feeding. In this article we draw on a study of Australian mothers of preschool-aged children to explore how women integrate new demands for healthy eating into their daily feeding practices. We found that these women were highly responsive to discourses of responsibility for 'healthy eating' (and fearful of obesity for their children). Yet, they expressed disquiet about intense bodily surveillance of children and were sometimes sceptical of measures of 'obesity' and overweight. Differing social and economic resources influenced how public prescriptions were mobilised in family food patterns, but all these women were in part resistant to circulating normative food discourses. We conclude that responsibility needs to be more richly defined as including women's resistance and reliance on their own embedded relational expertise with their children.

This paper analyses the evolution of poverty and deprivation. Besides, the study is focused on "consistent poverty", defined as the combination of income and living conditions. In the poverty literature, other papers show high exit and re-entry rates depending on temporary income shocks. These conclusions are tested in the case of deprivation and consistent poverty by using latent and mixed Markov models.
This study is based on the ECHP data for Spain (1994-2001)

This paper revisits the fitting of parametric distributions to earned income data. In line with Camilo Dagum's dictum that candidate distribution should not only be chosen for fit, but that economic content should also play a role, a new candidate is proposed. The fit of a simple finite mixture performs as well or better than the recently widely used generalized beta of the second kind (GB2) and is argued to be easier to interpret economically. Specifically, the good fit is taken as evidence for a finite level of segmentation in the labor market, with a distinctly different generating mechanism underlying each segment. It is speculated that this could be reconciled with either modern labor market models in which agent or firm heterogeneity can lead to different equilibrium configurations, or an older theory of labor market segmentation. In fact, the use of the mixture model addresses one of the central weaknesses of testing that older theory empirically. The approach taken in this paper is also motivated by the work of E. T. Jaynes, the father of maximum entropy approaches to statistical inference and related to the recent work by physicists on the distribution of income.