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Copyright of Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie ( KZfSS) is the property of Springer Nature and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Low socioeconomic status is regarded as a risk factor for social exclusion and victimization of children, but empirical evidence is mixed. Using longitudinal data from parent-child dyads of the German Family Panel (pairfam), we apply both pooled OLS (POLS) and fixed-effects regression models to test whether children experience more peer relationship problems if they live in a household with adverse economic conditions, i.e. with a household equivalence income below the poverty line. As fixed-effects models are based on intraindividual change over time, it is precluded that time-constant attributes of the child and its environment bias the estimation. We also estimate POLS models to link our results to prior research and to identify the role of time-constant factors such as migration background and parental education. We find a significant association between poverty and adverse peer relationships in the POLS estimations, but not in the within (fixed-effects) estimations. Parental education and family structure are found to significantly increase the likelihood of peer relationship problems, whereas this is not the case for migration background. Our findings imply that while children from disadvantaged families experience more adverse peer relationships, poverty itself is not the cause, but rather factors related to social status. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Do social comparison effects exacerbate children’s subjective experiences of poverty? Research on relative income effects indicates that reference groups are relevant to an individual’s well-being. While these effects are rather well understood for adults, it is unclear whether children are affected in a similar way. In our analysis, we investigate if children in low-income families perceive the economic situation in their home differently if they live in a wealthy (as compared to a disadvantaged) neighborhood. Drawing on parent and child data from the German Family Panel pairfam (3600 observations from 1691 dyads) enriched with district-level neighborhood data, we analyze the association between neighborhood socioeconomic status and children’s perceptions of the financial situation in their home. Controlling for a number of indicators for the economic situation in the family such as household income, social welfare benefits, and parents’ perception of family finances, we find that children from low-income families feel less deprived if they are living in neighborhoods with a higher socioeconomic status. In contrast, for children from families with an equivalence income above the median regional equivalence income no neighborhood effects are found. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Given the nature of leisure as largely uncoerced and not necessary for survival it seems obvious at a first glance that leisure activities should contribute to happiness. Indeed, recent research has found positive effects of leisure activities on subjective well-being. In this article, we analyze the association between leisure activities and life satisfaction based on longitudinal data from Germany. By applying fixed-effects regression models we are able to rule out potential bias due to unobserved heterogeneity in time-constant variables. We use data from three waves of the German Family Panel (pairfam), a large, randomly sampled longitudinal study of adolescents and adults (aged 15-41 across the observation period), to test the effects of five leisure activities (sports; vacation; meeting with friends; internet use; and TV viewing) on respondents' life satisfaction. Our results indicate that meeting with friends, doing sports, and going on vacation contributes positively to life satisfaction whereas internet use for personal purposes and TV consumption are negatively related to life satisfaction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much cross-sectional research documented associations between sexuality and life satisfaction, but very little longitudinal research on the topic has considered whether changes in sexuality and life satisfaction unfold together over time. Using data from 5582 individuals in partnerships surveyed across 5786 intimate relationships (providing 18,712 observations for analysis) during five waves of the German Family Panel (pairfam), this study examined whether intraindividual changes in sexual frequency and satisfaction were associated with corresponding intraindividual changes in life satisfaction. Fixed effects regression modeling results showed that individuals reported a greater increase (decrease) in life satisfaction when they also experienced a more substantial increase (decrease) in sexual frequency and satisfaction. This finding was consistent for men and women. This study contributes to the literature by documenting that naturally occurring increases in sexual frequency and satisfaction over time predicted corresponding increases in life satisfaction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite a large body of empirical literature on sexual satisfaction, its development over the course of a relationship is still unclear. Only a small number of studies, most of which have relied on cross-sectional data of convenience samples, have explicitly focused on relationship duration, and empirical evidence is mixed. We analyzed how sexual satisfaction changes over the course of a relationship using three waves of the German Family Panel study (pairfam). We concentrated our analyses on young and middle-aged heterosexual individuals in committed relationships (N = 2,814) and applied fixed effects regression models, which have the advantage of estimations based on changes within individuals over time. We found a positive development of sexual satisfaction in the first year of a relationship, followed by a steady decline. This pattern persisted even when controlling for the frequency of intercourse, although the effects were, in part, mediated by intercourse frequency. We explained the non-linear effect of relationship duration on sexual satisfaction with an initial learning effect regarding partner-specific sexual skills, which is then outweighed by a decline in passion at later stages of a relationship. Moreover, we found significant effects for the control variables of health status, intimacy in couple communication, and conflict style, as expected. In contrast to past research, however, cohabitation and marriage were not found to play a role for sexual satisfaction in our data. Further research is required to deepen the understanding of the reasons why sexual satisfaction changes with relationship duration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the beginning of the nineties, a number of studies indicate that weather conditions at interview day can have an effect on measurement, in particular regarding life satisfaction. In their seminal paper, Schwarz and Clore (J Pers Soc Psychol 45(3):513-523, ) show higher reported life satisfaction for sunny days, a finding which is replicated recently by Kämpfer and Mutz (Soc Indic Res 110(2):579-595, ). However, both studies are based on relatively small samples (from a few dozen up to 200 cases). We use data of the German Family Panel (pairfam) and local weather data for every respondent to investigate if weather effects on satisfaction measurement can be replicated with a large sample (about 7,000 respondents). In addition to cross-sectional analyses in which we follow closely the approach of Kämpfer and Mutz, we estimate fixed effects regressions to model the effect of weather on individual changes in satisfaction over time. We do neither find an effect of nice weather on the day of the interview on the respondents' ratings of general life satisfaction nor a consistent effect on any of the other satisfaction measures. These results show that at least with simple weather measures as they have been used as yet a relationship between weather conditions at interview day and answering behavior regarding life satisfaction cannot be found. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]