Suchergebnisse

Drawing on qualitative research with 27 Italian women aged between 40 and 80 years, this article examines how family structure, gender role expectations and caring roles impact on women's sleep at different points in their life course. Care work shapes sleep quality and duration for the majority of these women. High levels of sleep disturbance were found among women who cared for older frail or disabled relatives. Women caring for young children and adult children living at home also experience decreased sleep quality. When informal care is unsupported, very demanding and stress provoking, sleep disturbance is greater, with women experiencing insomnia, frequent awakenings and light sleep. The article discusses the implications of inadequate welfare provision in Italy, which increases women's unpaid domestic caring work resulting in adverse effects on sleep quality and their overall well being.

During the late nineteenth century, Italian immigrant settlement in Wales took the form of chain and clustered migration, based on origin-centred networks of extended family members. The original migrants' reliance on transnational family support networks endured and evolved through descendant generations. Family formation and the progression of lifecycle care exchanges served as key drivers of transnationalism between Wales and Italy. Many families established catering businesses in Wales that relied on staff recruitment from kin in Italy. Migrants' heritage and affective anchorage to Italy were maintained through 'circular' mobility premised on endogamy and shared language. In recent decades, despite a decline in endogamous marriage, transnational family interaction has continued on the basis of the ease of European Union cross-border mobility. Changing modes and motives for cyclical and return migration encompass new forms of marriage, professional and retirement migration. Based on etnographic research with three generations of Italian migrants in Wales, this article explores the relation between family social networks and local attachment in supporting transnational practices, positive integration and heritage maintainance, tracing the cultural and social change in the generational process of migration.