Ursula Henz

The London School of Economics and Political Science | LSE · Department of Sociology

Increasing longevity has led to a rising number of adult children who are at higher ages when they provide care for their parents. Drawing on the life-course approach and exchange theory, the paper addresses similarities and differences in parent care between late-mid-aged and older adult children. The study uses the UK Longitudinal Household Study...

Gender inequality of childcare provision is regarded as one of the main barriers to women’s labour-market careers. However, there is a scarcity of quantitative studies that examine fathers’ and mothers’ combined childcare. This research focuses on husband’s and wife’s timing and type of childcare for co-resident couples with a young child. Using th...

BACKGROUND Many studies of Western societies have documented an increasing involvement of fathers with their children since the 1970s. The trend reflects changes in the meaning of fatherhood and contributes to child well-being and gender equality. New policies in the United Kingdom might have further encouraged father involvement in the new millenn...

This paper examines trends in assortative mating in Britain over the last sixty years. Assortative mating is the tendency for like to form a conjugal partnership with like. Our focus is on the association between the social class origins of the partners. The propensity towards assortative mating is taken as an index of the openness of society which...

Increasing numbers of childless men as well as fathers with reduced or no contact with their children have sparked concern about an erosion of fatherhood. Although the general trend is undisputed, claims about men's decreasing family involvement lack a sound empirical basis that enables comparisons between countries and sub-groups of society. Obje...

This article examines the influence of job demands and job-related resources on the experience of two dimensions of work-life conflict (WLC) in Britain. Theory suggests that higher levels of resources should reduce WLC but empirical analyses often fail to find this effect. We address the issue by examining the impact of a wide range of resources as...

The study adapts theories of the household division of labor to the division of parent care between spouses and expands them by taking the kin relationship with the parent and the intensity of care into account. Tobit and weighted logit models are used to analyze the division of parent care in 2,214 couples from the British General Household Survey...

This study examines whether and how couples share the provision of informal care for their parents. Four waves of the British General Household Survey contain cross-sectional information about caring for parents and parents-in-law. Descriptive and multivariate analyses were conducted on 2214 couples that provided parent care. The findings emphasise...

Presuming that not just economic circumstances but also ideational factors influence fertility decisions, the paper examines the values of children of East and West-German childless men and women living with a partner. Based on the survey about ‘Change and Development of Family Life Forms’, a confirmatory factor analysis identifies an affective, a...

This article addresses the relationship between employment and providing informal care for sick, disabled, or elderly people in Great Britain. Hazard rate models for taking up caring and leaving work when caring are estimated using retrospective family, employment, and caring data from the British Family and Working Lives Survey 1994 – 1995 for 9,1...

In this paper, we test the hypothesis that unique effects of stepfamily composition on union fertility are confounded with differences between stepfamilies and couples without stepchildren in the risk of union disruption. We use birth and union histories from Fertility and Family Surveys in Austria, Finland, France and West Germany. The risks of a...

Several recent studies have documented a negative relationship between informal care-giving and labour market attachment in Great Britain. This paper examines the relationship from a longitudinal perspective using data from the Great Britain 1994–95 Family and Working Lives Survey. The first part of the paper studies the timing of informal care-giv...

This article investigates whether economic dependency is negatively related to separation in Sweden by examining the Swedish Level-of-Living Surveys coupled with annual register data on income. This provides the opportunity to study the relative income and the family status of a random sample of the adult population during (most of) a twenty-four-y...

This article investigates the extent of multiple-role occupancy among midlife individuals in Britain in cross-section and over the life course, focusing on work and family commitments. The association between demographic and social factors and multiple-role obligations is also investigated. The research is based on secondary analysis of the British...

A popular song in Sweden is entitled „Love is not blind, but fairly shortsighted“, That is half way to a concession to a regular finding in studies of marriage patterns, namely that factors of little romantic flavor are important for partner selection. People on the whole tend not to „marry out“ of their social group, whether it be ethnic, religiou...

The present paper studies birth rates in partnerships with at least one child. This child is either a shared child of the couple or it comes from a previous partnership of one of the partners. Data from the German "Fertility and Family Survey" (FFS) is used to estimate piecewise-linear log-hazard mOdels for having another child. Time starts at part...

The present paper studies fertility rates in partnerships with and without children from previous partners in East and West Germany. Data from the German "Fertility and Family Survey" is used to estimate piecewise-linear hazard rate models for having another child. It turns out that a proportional-hazard model would give incorrect results because c...

We investigate potential effects of stepfamily status on births in unions in Austria, Finland, France, and West Germany. In all four countries, we find support for the value of a first union birth to signal the couple's commitment. Birth rates are higher if the couple has no shared children, net of their total (hers + his) parity. Unexpectedly, cou...

Purpose: this article investigates the extent of multiple- role occupancy among midlife individuals in Britain in cross-section and over the life course, focusing on work and family commitments. The association between demographic and social factors and multiple-role obligations is also investigated. Design and Methods: the research is based on sec...

This is the first systematic international comparative study of the transformation of couples careers in modern societies. The countries included are Germany, the Netherlands, the Flemish part of Belgium, Italy, Spain, Great Britain, the United States, Sweden, Denmark, Poland, Hungary, and China. Using longitudinal data, this book explores what has...

We introduce a new hybrid approach to joint estimation of Value at Risk (VaR) and Expected Shortfall (ES) for high quantiles of return distributions. We investigate the relative performance of VaR and ES models using daily returns for sixteen stock market indices (eight from developed and eight from emerging markets) prior to and during the 2008 fi...

The application of parametric split models to analyse the birth of the first child is discussed by applying the model of A. J. Coale and D. R. McNeil [J. Am. Stat. Assoc., Appl. Sect. 67, 743-749 (1972)] and the log-logistic model. We show that serious problems of estimating the final survival probability may occur when the empirical age distributi...

Die schwedische Familienpolitik gründet sich auf das Prinzip der wirtschaftlichen Unabhängigkeit von Männern und Frauen. Sowohl Männern als auch Frauen soll es ermöglicht werden, einen bezahlten Arbeitsplatz innezuhaben, ohne damit ihre Aufgaben in der Kindererziehung zu vernachlässigen. Wieweit sind diese Ziele erreicht worden? Im folgenden präsen...

In the (West-)German educational system the so-called "second educational path" and vocational education are additional routes to the attainment of general educational qualifications. During recent decades, the probability of doing so has risen considerably due to the expansion of vocational schools and the introduction of double qualifications. Th...

In the (West)German school system, people can transfer from one type of secondary school to another under certain conditions. The paper provides analyses of such transitions based on the German Life History Study. It contains information about the (West)German birth cohorts from 1919-21, 1929-31, 1939-41, 1949-51, 1954-56, and 1959-61. The number o...

Zusammenfassung Die frühe Festlegung der Bildungsverläufe im bundesdeutschen Schulsystem kann durch Schulformwechsel korrigiert werden. In der vorliegenden Arbeit werden Analysen von Schulformwechseln nach der Schulwahl am Ende der Grundschule vorgestellt. Sie basieren auf den Daten der Lebensverlaufsstudie für die (westdeutschen Geburtskohorten 19...

In den vergangenen 30 Jahren wurde durch verschiedene Maßnahmen die Flexibilität des westdeutschen Bildungssystems erhöht. Innerhalb des Ersten Bildungsweges wurde der Wechsel zwischen verschiedenen Schulformen erleichtert, und nach dem Ende des Ersten Bildungsweges wurden die Möglichkeiten des Nachholens allgemeinbildender Abschlüsse erweitert. Im...

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Die Frage nach der Angleichung der Bildungschancen konnte bisher nicht befriedigend beantwortet werden. Einerseits kann man aufgrund des Schulausbaus und der größeren Durchlässigkeit des Schulsystems einen Abbau von Bildungsbarrieren erwarten. Andererseits spricht der Beitrag des Bildungssystems zu der Reproduktion der Klassenstruktur für eine Fort...