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Background: Physical and mental health are important markers of quality of life. Little is known about how they unfold in tandem in the last years of life. Objective: We take a life-course perspective to identify typical joint trajectories of functional limitations and depression in the last eight years before death. Our objective is to assess whether there is only a linear association between functional limitations and depression or if we also find groups marked by high and increasing functional limitations but low depression, and vice versa. Methods: Data from 10 waves of the Health and Retirement Study that cover US Americans who died between 2003-2014 are analyzed with sequence, cluster, and multinomial logistic regression methods. Results: Results show five typical trajectories of joint functional limitations and depression. Corroborating previous findings, three groups support a linear positive relationship between functional limitations and depression. Beyond previous research, we find two resilient groups of medium and high functional limitations combined with stable low depression. The five groups are highly stratified by social status, gender, marital status, and subjective life expectancy reported at the beginning of the trajectories. Conclusions: Physical and mental health trajectories at the end of life are not only linearly associated. Medium and high functional limitations go along with a polarized pattern of either stable high or stable low depression. Contribution: The nonlinear relationship between functional limitations and depression in the last years of life represented by the 'Resilient' groups of medium and high functional limitations with low depression have gone largely unnoticed in previous research and should be investigated in future studies.

The article presents the findings of two large international comparative social research projects, the project 'GLOBALIFE - life courses in the globalisation process' and the research network 'TransEurope', on the effects of globalisation processes on individual life course patterns in modern societies. On the basis of an index for measuring the multidimensional phenomenon of globalisation, it is demonstrated how this phenomenon can be illustrated and how its historical development can be traced empirically. Based on a comparative analysis of life course patterns from seven European countries (Belgium, Germany, Estonia, the Czech Republic, Austria, Sweden and the Netherlands), we examine if and which ways the globalisation process has impacted on selected aspects of life and employment histories of women and men in modern industrial societies. The results show that globalisation has not contributed to a generalisation of risks and an accelerated development of patchwork careers. Rather, globalisation-induced risks concentrate systematically on specific groups in the labour market. Country-specific welfare state institutions and different modes of labour market regulation 'filter' the globalisation process and contribute to a wide diversity of 'globalisation effects' among different modern industrialised countries. (IAB)

Globalization definitely has been one of the most discussed issues in social sciences during the last decade, and still is today. Despite this grown interest, the measurement of globalization still remains vague or often one-sidedly restricted to the analysis of its economic dimension, thereby neglecting the multidimensionality of the phenomenon of globalization. As a consequence, a differentiated measure of globalization covering both economic and social aspects that can be, for example, introduced into multivariate analysis of survey data as an explanatory variable, is still largely missing. In this article, we suggest a multi-dimensional globalization measure, encompassing economic, (socio-)technological, cultural, and political dimensions of global change. It builds on previous globalization measures, but extends them by additional dimensions and indicators representing central facets of a genuine sociological concept of globalization. Our contribution starts by shortly describing the multidimensional nature of the globalization process and then develops an overall sociological index of globalization, which we call Global- Index, covering a total of 97 different countries from 1970 to 2002. Based on this measure, we first describe the development of globalization on a worldwide scale and across economic regions. Next, we demonstrate the potential of the Global-Index for the analysis of contemporary survey data by illustratively including it into two micro-level longitudinal analyses of labor market transitions during the early career in Germany and the United Kingdom." (Author's abstract, IAB-Doku) ((en))