In France, Where do People Live in Their Last Month of Life and Where do They Die?
Sophie Pennec, Joëlle Gaymu, Alain Monnier, Françoise Riou, Régis Aubry, Silvia Pontone, Chantal Cases
This article describes the residential trajectories and places of residence of patients over their last month of life, based on the end-of-life survey "Fin de vie en France", conducted in 2010 on a representative sample of deaths occurring in December 2009. The physicians who had certified the deaths were questioned about the end-of-life circumstances. While three in five people die in hospital, only half were in hospital a month before their death. Over that last month, the most common move is from home to hospital. Those already in hospital or living in a care home a month before death are very likely to remain there until they die. Multivariate analyses show that age and sex influence the end-of-life trajectory: it is the oldest individuals, and women, who are most likely to spend their last month in a care home. Symptoms, type of disease and purpose of treatment also play a role. Not all clinical situations can be handled through home care: treatment of acute episodes, respiratory distress and digestive problems are more often treated in hospital, mental disorders in care homes and mobility problems in both these places.
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Satisfaction with the Division of Household Tasks in Switzerland: A Longitudinal Approach
Caroline Henchoz, Boris Wernli
A longitudinal analysis of data from the Swiss Household Panel shows that satisfaction with the division of household tasks decreases when children aged 0-17 are present in the household, subsequently increases, and then drops again after retirement. This W-shaped pattern over time varies across individuals, however, as the sense of satisfaction is a construct that is gendered and generational, individual and interactional. Although the effect is small, men’s satisfaction is more influenced by the number of hours spent on housework than that of women, so despite large inequalities, women often report being satisfied with household organization. Women’s satisfaction depends on a larger number of factors, notably increasing expectations of equality over the generations. It is correlated above all with their partner’s practical and emotional involvement. Overall, men’s and women’s satisfaction with the division of household tasks depends primarily on their perception of a number of aspects of common life which go beyond the domestic sphere, such as their partner’s feelings. Thus, to fully capture the sense of satisfaction, an analysis must include not only the type of household tasks concerned, as is often the case, but also the context within which they are divided and the individuals involved.
Relationships between Adolescents and Grandparents in Switzerland: Conjugal Separation and Lineage Effects
Alexandre Pillonel, Cornelia Hummel, Ivan De Carlo
What type of relationship is maintained between grandparents and grandchildren when the couple formed by the intermediate generation is separated? This question is analysed using data from the Swiss survey Enfants, adolescents et leurs grands-parents dans une société en mutation (Children, adolescents and their grandparents in a changing society) conducted in 2004 on a sample of 685 adolescents who were asked about their relationships with their grandparents. They highlight several facets of these relationships, notably with regard to lineage effects. Contrasting with the now classic assertion of matrilateral bias following divorce or separation, our multivariate analyses provide some original new insights: while grandparent-grandchild relations are indeed weaker when the parents are separated than when their union is intact, the difference is quite small. Moreover, matrilateral bias is observed not only in separated families, but also in intact ones, and parental separation is not associated within an increase in matrilateral bias. In our societies, these findings can be interpreted as a sign of changing relationships between family members after parental separation.
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Recent Features of Cohabitational and Marital Fertility in Romania
Jan M. Hoem, Cornelia Mureşan, Mihaela Hărăguş
Until the late 1980s there was little non-marital cohabitation in Romania. After the fall of state socialism, the overall fraction in consensual unions grew steadily, and by 2005 it had reached some 10%. This development had consequences for the patterns of childbearing. The present paper presents selected features of fertility in consensual and marital unions in Romania over the period 1985-2005 based on the data from the national Generations and Gender Survey conducted in Romania in 2005. To this end we use underlying fertility rates specified by union duration and utilize a metric based on an aggregation of such rates over all durations, irrespective of parity. We also highlight groups of women who have been particularly prone to have children outside marriage, namely women with a low educational attainment and women of a rural origin. Women in consensual unions in these two groups were strongly affected by the dramatic changes in family policies around 1990, and their aggregate fertility in cohabitational unions in subsequent years is similar to that of marital unions. For the fertility of partnered women in the two groups, it does not seem to matter much whether they are married or not.
Age Compositional Adjustments for Educational Participation Indicators
Bilal F. Barakat, Rachel E. Durham, Clarissa Guimarães Rodrigues
Educational behaviour varies by age. One implication of this fact is that the value of aggregate education indicators such as enrolment ratios is influenced by the age structure of the population through a pure composition effect. This phenomenon is not generally acknowledged in educational statistics, much less accounted for. The scant treatment the question of age distribution has received in this context has been limited to examining it as a source of measurement error when comparing administrative and survey data sources. By using an age standardization technique, the authors show how this very common demographic tool can straightforwardly be applied to educational metrics and how doing so alters the results. They conclude that the effect on net and gross participation ratios is moderate in general, but where comparisons are made between contexts with different cohort growth or school attendance profiles, lack of attention to population structures could bias conclusions.
