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The aim of this article is to provide insight into the circumstances of long-term unemployed graduates of (mostly) non-GCSE vocational programmes from the perspective of their transition to adulthood. The analytical framework used for this research is life course theory, according to which it is possible to approach the transition from youth to adulthood as a multiple transition. This point corresponds well with reality because young people follow at least three trajectories on their way to adulthood: from school to work, from family of origin to family of procreation, and from dependence to independence. The data necessary for the analysis were collected through repeated biographical and semi-structured interviews with 14 long-term unemployed graduates of non-GCSE vocational programmes and 6 employed graduates of vocational programmes as a reference group. Their implicit theories of adulthood, progress on the path to adulthood, and everyday strategies were examined in a qualitative data analysis, with special attention paid to contextual aspects. As for the dominant form of transition, the author found that long-term unemployment has a delaying impact on the transition to adulthood, above all owing to financial strain. These people suffer from prolonged economical dependency on their parents and remain at the threshold of the socially constructed path to adulthood. Typically there social status is vague.

The article examines the meanings that space and things acquire in the context of ageing and old age. The author draws on a study that was conducted with the objective of understanding the signifi cance of autonomy in old age and the ways in which the elderly attempt to maintain it. The data from this study were subjected to a follow-up qualitative analysis based on the reformulated research question: 'What role do space and things play in the life of a senior as a person of a certain age at a certain period of life?' The results of the analysis are presented in the third part of the article, following sections devoted to the subject of space and things in sociological gerontology and to a description of the methodology used in the cited research. The analysis reveals that space and things are meaningful elements in the lives of seniors, who place them within three main frames: physical independence or personal autonomy and security, integration into informal social networks, and the home as a subjective centre of community. Space and things clearly become an important part of the strategies of 'coping with ageing'.

Surveys often reveal that the number of children people would like to have is greater than the number they actually have. This article examines the question of why people actually want children and bases its answers on data from the 2006 Value of Children Survey, which reintroduces the value of children concept from the 1970s. The battery of survey questions used identified six dimensions of the value of children (The positives of parenthood; Natural drives and goals; Tradition and social status; Social pressure; Limitations and losses; and Decision inhibitors). The respondents, young people between the ages of 28 and 34, see the main reasons for deciding to have children in the positive feelings associated with raising children and with successful parenthood as a natural part of life. They associate parenthood less with responses about social norms and pressure or with rational considerations about all the pros and cons of having children, and they see parenthood as their own, individual decision. A data analysis based on a multinomial logistic regression shows that declared attitudes to a limited extent influence the preferred number of children and that the Czech population is still dominated by the idea of the two-child family with two biological parents, while declared voluntary childlessness is still a marginal phenomenon.

The aim of this article is to explain educational reproduction in the Czech Lands between 1906 and 2003 from the perspective of educational mobility. Mobility trends in the intergenerational transmission of educational status identified in an analysis are presented in the context of findings on odds ratios in education and in a historical context. The analysis is based on observations of the intergenerational transmission of educational status, i.e. educational mobility, in two educational transitions between three educational levels (lower secondary, upper secondary, and higher education). Mobility tables and their log-linear analysis are used to help explain what mobility processes shape the educational inequalities that have proved stable over the long term and also odds ratios between the main levels of education. The article helps fill in the gap in knowledge about the long-term development of the educational structure in the historical Czech Lands and Czechoslovakia and provides information about typical mobility trajectories and varying mobility patterns in periods before 1948, between 1948 and 1989, and after 1989. An understanding of these structural contexts helps clarify what occurred in the past and what is occurring now in the area of unequal access to education and to explain one of the main findings from the analysis – that in Czech society the transmission of a family's educational status from one generation to the next continuously follows the same patterns.

This article deals with the concept of 'mainstream youth' in the context of late modernity. The sociology of youth has traditionally operated from two distinct perspectives concerned with either 'youth transitions' or 'youth (sub)cultures'. This polarisation has led to the neglect of the experience of mainstream youth, who cannot be easily pigeon-holed into the above categories. Drawing on a series of focus groups and small-group semi-structured interviews with 61 young people, the authors analysed young people's experience of consumption in the Czech Republic. Using the experience of young consumers, the research attempted to understand what it means to belong to the mainstream. The results indicate that belonging to the mainstream does not imply straightforward compliance with dominant power structures, but rather refl ects a degree of reflexivity in which young people challenge stereotypes of passive conformism in complex and often paradoxical ways that are not yet well accounted for in the literature. The article suggests that the notion of 'mainstream youth' offers some potential as a conceptual way of understanding young people's relationship to social change in what appears to be an increasingly individualised society. At the same time, this notion provides an alternative approach that challenges many of the assumptions underpinning the sociology of youth's conception of consumption.