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The occurrence and timing of major demographic decisions in the transition to adulthood is strongly stratified, with young adults with a high socio-economic status (SES) background usually experiencing many of these events later than young adults with a low SES background. To explain this social stratification, we outline a theoretical framework in which social stratification affects choice in the transition to adulthood through three, potentially reinforcing, pathways: stratified socialization, stratified agency, and stratified opportunity. We test our framework against longitudinal data from two waves of the Generations and Gender Surveys for Austria, Bulgaria, and France. We find evidence for the importance of all three pathways. Furthermore, processes differ little by gender, age and country context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We argue that the divergence in fertility trends in advanced societies is influenced by the interaction of long-standing differences in generalized trust with the increase in women's educational attainment. Our argument builds on the idea that trust enhances individuals' and couples' willingness to outsource childcare to outside their extended family. This becomes critically important as women's increased education leads to greater demand for combining work and family life. We test our hypothesis using data from the World Values Survey and European Values Study on 36 industrialized countries between the years 1981 and 2009. Multilevel statistical analyses reveal that the interaction between national-level generalized trust and cohort-level women's education is positively associated with completed fertility. As education among women expands, high levels of generalized trust moderate fertility decline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

. We compare two techniques that are widely used in the analysis of life course trajectories: latent class analysis and sequence analysis. In particular, we focus on the use of these techniques as devices to obtain classes of individual life course trajectories. We first compare the consistency of the classification that is obtained via the two techniques by using a data set on the life course trajectories of young adults. Then, we adopt a simulation approach to measure the ability of these two methods to classify groups of life course trajectories correctly when specific forms of 'random' variability are introduced within prespecified classes in an artificial data set. To do so, we introduce simulation operators that have a life course and/or observational meaning. Our results contribute on the one hand to outline the usefulness and robustness of findings based on the classification of life course trajectories through latent class analysis and sequence analysis and on the other hand to illuminate the potential pitfalls in applications of these techniques. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present an approach to the construction of clusters of life course trajectories and use it to obtain ideal types of trajectories that can be interpreted and analysed meaningfully. We represent life courses as sequences on a monthly timescale and apply optimal matching analysis to compute dissimilarities between individuals. We introduce a new divisive clustering algorithm which has features that are in common with both Ward's agglomerative algorithm and classification and regression trees. We analyse British Household Panel Survey data on the employment and family trajectories of women. Our method produces clusters of sequences for which it is straightforward to determine who belongs to each cluster, making it easier to interpret the relative importance of life course factors in distinguishing subgroups of the population. Moreover our method gives guidance on selecting the number of clusters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Economic hardship accompanying large recessions can lead families to terminate unplanned pregnancies. To assess whether abortions have risen during the recession, we collected crude abortion data from 2000 to 2012 from Eurostat for countries that had legal abortions and complete data. Declining trends in abortion ratios between 2000 and 2009 have been reversing. Excess abortions between 2010 and 2012 totaled 10.6 abortions per 1000 pregnancies ending in abortion or birth or 6701 additional abortions (95% CI 1190-9240) with stronger effects in younger ages. Economic shocks may increase recourse to abortion. Further research should explore causal pathways and protective factors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]