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This paper investigates European patterns of intergenerational contact. A large number of studies in family sociology and gerontology demonstrate the explanatory power of micro-level variables, but the effect of the socio-cultural context on intergenerational arrangements rarely has been appraised. A comprehensive review of prominent classifications of European family and welfare regimes prompts the main research question: Do these macro-level typologies add heuristic value to the investigation of intergenerational arrangements in contemporary Europe? Further, as previous studies have focused mainly on Western Europe alone, Eastern European countries are included using comparable micro-data from the first wave of the Generations and Gender Survey (UNO, 2005). Launched and coordinated by the UNECE, the GGS panel survey was carried out between 2004 and 2010. Within each participating country nationally representative samples of the 18-79 year old resident population are conducted under the direction of national experts and institutions. For a selection of West and (South) East European countries the frequency of face-to-face contact of respondents aged 60 years and older to their adult children is explored. Controlling for several individual-level characteristics, significant country differences remain. A west-east division coincides with a less stark north-south division. Contact is most frequent in Georgia and Bulgaria; it is lower in Estonia, the Russian Federation, and Germany and lowest in France. Belgium, with its very high contact rate, is an exceptional case. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1997, the Wellcome Trust Biomedical Ethics programme was launched in the UK, with a strategy that sought to encourage bioethics research that married normative philosophical bioethics and social science methodologies. This paper explores a few of the children of this marriage, particularly those approaches that have been taken in an attempt to make this interdisciplinary marriage a happy one. We suggest that the dominant discourse has involved social science for bioethics, and sociology of bioethics, and we suggest further that neither of these approaches represent a happy and equal marriage. We then outline a third approach: social science in bioethics. Drawing upon our experiences of conducting such a project we describe the broad methodological approach that we have taken, and outline how, and why, this approach might be productive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]