Attitudes promoting “intensive parenting” are prevalent in many countries and are associated with mothering and class privilege. Are intensive parenting attitudes widespread and similarly classed in Sweden, which has historically shifted burdens off parents and reduced inequalities? Using the 2021 Generations and Gender Survey, descriptive and latent class analyses identified predominant patterns of intensive parenting attitudes and sociodemographic predictors among Swedes. Moderate population-level agreement with measures of intensive parenting attitudes obscured subgroup variability in intensive parenting profiles and a reversed relationship with class. About half of respondents, disproportionately younger, foreign-born, and female, belonged to concordant latent classes that strongly or moderately subscribed to intensive parenting attitudes. Another third belonged to a discordant class dominated by older, Swedish-born, class-advantaged respondents espousing certain aspects of intensive parenting attitudes in a distinct pattern not yet identified elsewhere. This dissonance in predominant parenting attitudes among Swedes may have interesting implications for norms and policies.

Background: The number of confirmed COVID-19 deaths differed across countries and across waves of the pandemic. Patterns also differed between groups within a country.

Objective: We combine data on excess mortality with data on cause-of-death-specific mortality in the case of Sweden to identify which groups had excess mortality beyond what can be captured by analyses of COVID-19-specific deaths. We also explore the possibility that some groups may have benefited in terms of reduced all-cause mortality, potentially due to home-centered living conditions during the pandemic.

Methods: We produced and compared three sets of group-specific incidence rates: deaths from (1) any cause in 2020, (2) any cause in 2019, (3) any cause excluding COVID-19 in 2020. We compared rates across different socioeconomic profiles based on combinations of sex, age, marital status, education, and country of birth.

Contribution: We show that many of those who died during 2020 would not have done so in the absence of the pandemic. We find some evidence of COVID-19 mortality underestimation, mainly among individuals with a migration background. We also found groups for which mortality decreased during the pandemic, even when including COVID-19 mortality. Progression across the first and second waves of the pandemic shows that more groups appeared to become protected over time and that there was less underestimation of COVID-19 mortality in the second part of 2020.

Many demographic challenges and new trends have been observed across formerly state socialist countries after embarking on their political and economic transition. Including countries that range from Eastern Europe to Central Asia, this study explores whether some family-related events were more sensitive to the transformation that occurred in the 1990s than others, and whether the disruption was immediate or delayed across this wide range of contexts. Based on year-specific hazard ratios over four decades, results point to changes in fertility patterns being clearly linked to the transition. Second birth rates reacted almost immediately to societal disruption, whereas a more delayed change occurred for first births. Although abrupt changes in marriage and divorce rates also occurred, these changes often began before the transition and therefore may be part of longer-term developments. That second births were the most sensitive family event to the immediate change in conditions may be due to economic costs, but also unique characteristics related both to its lack of conferring a new social role on the individual, such as in the case of marriage and parenthood, and the narrower window of time in which this event usually occurs. The delayed changes in first births may instead reflect changes in norms and culture that influenced younger individuals when they reached childbearing ages.

Objectives This is the first population-level study to examine inequalities in COVID-19 mortality according to working-age individuals' occupations and the indirect occupational effects on COVID-19 mortality of older individuals who live with them.

Methods We used early-release data for the entire population of Sweden of all recorded COVID-19 deaths from 12 March 2020 to 23 February 2021, which we linked to administrative registers and occupational measures. Cox proportional hazard models assessed relative risks of COVID-19 mortality for the working-aged population registered in an occupation in December 2018 and the older population who lived with them.

Results Among working aged-adults, taxi/bus drivers had the highest relative risk of COVID-19 mortality: over four times that of skilled workers in IT, economics, or administration when adjusted only for basic demographic characteristics. After adjusting for socioeconomic factors (education, income and country of birth), there are no occupational groups with clearly elevated (statistically significant) COVID-19 mortality. Neither a measure of exposure within occupations nor the share that generally can work from home were related to working-aged adults' risk of COVID-19 mortality. Instead of occupational factors, traditional socioeconomic risk factors best explained variation in COVID-19 mortality. Elderly individuals, however, faced higher COVID-19 mortality risk both when living with a delivery or postal worker or worker(s) in occupations that generally work from home less, even when their socioeconomic factors are taken into account.

Conclusions Inequalities in COVID-19 mortality of working-aged adults were mostly based on traditional risk factors and not on occupational divisions or characteristics in Sweden. However, older individuals living with those who likely cannot work from home or work in delivery or postal services were a vulnerable group.

Educational gradients in parental leave length are opposite for women and men: highly educated women return to work faster than those with low education while highly educated men are absent longer than less educated men. Explanations for the opposite gradients are typically made at the individual- or couple-level. To date, no quantitative study has documented whether the opposite educational gradients hold also within workplaces. In this study, we use employer-employee matched Swedish register data with fixed-effects models to examine whether the educational gradient applies also among co-workers in the same workplace. The results show that three-quarters of the educational effect typically attributed to the individual father disappeared when comparing fathers within workplaces. The educational gradient of mothers remained largely unchanged. These findings provide the first population-level evidence for the primacy of the workplace in determining fathers' care choices.

Co-residential partnerships are a pre-condition for childbearing and less time is spent in these unions when there is diffi-culty finding partners, a delay in union formation, and partnership instability. Our study explores patterns in co-residential partnerships across birth cohorts in 11 post-socialist countries to assess changes in the number of years spent in these partnerships and the patterns underlying any trend. Using the Harmonized Histories dataset, based on partnership data from generations and gender surveys, we calculate changes in co-residential union trends. In about half of the countries, the share of women who have not entered a co-residential union by age 30 increased, whereas the proportion still in their first union by this age decreased universally. The latter trend, reflecting union instability, pre-dates the transition from socialism. Delays in starting the first union were seen in only a few countries immediately after the transition began but more countries experienced union postponement in coming-of-age cohorts in the 2000s. A declining median age at first union in the former Soviet republics before and immediately after the transition from socialism balances the impact of increased union instability. Overall, the number of years spent in a co-residential union before age 30 declined across the Central and South-Eastern European countries, especially in Hungary. Union dynamics may have contributed to declining fertility in these countries. In contrast, little or no change in time spent in unions in the post-Soviet countries indicates that union dynamics were less likely to have influenced these women's fertility behavior.

This study analyses the influence of family policies on women’s first and second births in 20 countries over the period 1995 to 2007. Welfare states have shifted towards social investment policies, yet family policy–fertility research has not explicitly considered this development. We distinguish between social investment-oriented and passive support that families may receive upon the birth of a child and consider changes in policies over time. These indicators are merged with fertility histories provided by harmonized individual-level data, and we use time-conditioned, fixed effects linear probability models. We find higher social investment-oriented support to be correlated with increased first birth probabilities, in contrast to passive family support. First birth probabilities particularly declined with higher passive family support for women over age 30, which points to a potential increase in childlessness. Social investment-oriented support is positively related to first and second births particularly for lower-educated women and has no relationship to childbirth for highly educated women, countering the Matthew-effect assumptions about social investment policies. Passive support is negatively related to second births for post-secondary educated women and those who are studying. Family policies that support women’s employment and labour market attachment are positively linked to family expansion and these policies minimize educational differences in childbearing.

This article applies a couple perspective to assessing gender inequality in Sweden—a setting with high maternal labour force participation, a long history of family policy investment, and strong norms of gender equality. We address open questions about how couples’ earnings following parenthood have changed over time, and how patterns of inequality in couples’ earnings have played out across educational groups. Our study uses fixed effects methods and register data covering the total population of heterosexual couples giving birth in Sweden between 1987 and 2007 (N = 587,414 couples). It examines change in the female partner’s share of total couple earnings from 2 years before to 8 years after first birth across parent cohorts differentiated by his and her education. Women’s earnings share declines steeply following birth, across all groups. Results show modestly smaller declines among parents in the latest cohort in the year directly following childbirth. Change is most pronounced among couples with a highly educated female partner, and it appears driven by a marked dip in fathers’ earnings that is new to this recent generation of men. Recent movement towards within-couple equality in Sweden appears driven by men’s work adjustments, pointing to an important shift in the allocation of care work within couples. 

Great gains have been made in providing researchers geo-spatial data that can be combined with population health data. This development is crucial given concerns over the human health outcomes associated with a changing climate. Merging population and environmental data remains both conceptually and technically challenging because of a large range of temporal and spatial scales. Here we propose a framework that addresses and advances both conceptual and technical aspects of population-environment research. This framework can be useful for considering how any time or space-based environmental occurrence influences population health outcomes and can be used to guide different data aggregation strategies. The primary consideration discussed here is how to properly model the space and time effects of environmental context on individual-level health outcomes, specifically maternal, child and reproductive health outcomes. The influx of geospatial health data and highly detailed environmental data, often at daily scales, provide an opportunity for population-environment researchers to move towards a more theoretically and analytically sound approach for studying environment and health linkages.

BACKGROUND

Family policies influence how men and women structure their time in the labour market and in the home. Analyses based on expenditure data, regime types, and single policies, however, cannot represent how policies support individuals' labour market attachment and care for children. Data from the Social Policy Indicator (SPIN) database offer a tool for measuring the extent to which the family policies of a country support both the earner-carer and the traditional-family models. This large-scale database offers harmonized data on social policies over time for a wide range of countries. It allows scholars to empirically push the frontiers of research on the intersection of gender equality, family and employment dynamics, and social policy.

METHODS

We describe how measures of earner-carer and traditional-family support were constructed using data from the SPIN database. We use the cases of Lithuania and Sweden to compare the policy developments over time and demonstrate how these developments are represented by SPIN data.

CONTRIBUTION

We present data from the SPIN database, which provides a useful tool for demographers and social scientists interested in the link between family policies and fertility. We describe the range of applications in demographic research so far as well as the advantages and limitations of the database. Using Lithuania and Sweden as an example, we also highlight how the data mirror convergence and divergence in family policy in comparative perspective.