PopDigests

In Estonia, persons with disabilities are entitled to rehabilitation services, so in order to ensure that services are successful, the government has made efforts to modernize its system. To understand how clients feel about these services, Karin Hanga and colleagues conducted interviews with 12 individuals about their previous experiences with disability services and the newly-implemented initial rehabilitation needs assessment questionnaire to determine if the Estonian disability system is providing a person-centred approach.

In a new study, Conkova, Fokkema and Dykstra examined the extent to which Europeans opt for support from friends, neighbors and colleagues when looking for advice and help with finding a new job. The authors compared preferences for kin, non-kin (unpaid) and professional (paid) support with data from the European Quality of Life Survey for 27 countries. Their results suggest that Europeans vary greatly in their preferences for support, and that these variations are associated with the cultural context in which they are embedded.

Handgrip strength is seen as a powerful predictor of mortality across individuals. However, there is no research evidence about the levels and predictive ability of grip strength for mortality in Russian populations compared to the predictive ability of grip strength of other European populations, e.g. in England and Denmark. In England life expectancy levels are close to the EU average, while grip strength levels are slightly above EU average. Denmark has a below-average life expectancy level across EU countries, but it is one of the countries with the highest grip strength scores.

In a recent study, Francesco C. Billari, Osea Giuntella and Luca Stella analysed whether the availability of high-speed Internet influences fertility choices in Germany. The authors worked with data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP). It is a unique dataset because it provides information on fertility histories, availability of Internet access, and also on whether Internet access is based on broadband (DSL) technology.

Many societies, particularly in the Nordic region, have made efforts over the last decades to create more gender-equal family leave policies. These policies are supposed to encourage fathers to take time off from work to help care for their children by making it easier to do so. Once these policies are in place, it is a matter of making sure fathers actually take advantage of them. Jussi Tervola, Ann-Zofie Duvander and Eleonora Mussino took a close look at these policies to see if immigrant fathers are also using these benefits to take time off from work to help care for their children.

It is well known that having a child requires some lifestyle adjustments. Parenthood can hinder the wellbeing of new parents since it is difficult to combine the demands of a child with work and leisure. In this study, A. Roeters, J.J. Mandemakers and M. Voorpostel  take into account the lifestyle differences of individuals before becoming parents. Using data from eleven waves of the Swiss Household Panel, the researchers investigate to what extent individuals’ participation in leisure activities and paid work moderates the effects of parenthood on wellbeing.

In the last decades, partnership markets in Europe have experienced an increase in so-called “secondary singles”, meaning individuals who have been married in the past and who are now ready to start a new relationship. For some of them, dating someone who has children may be undesirable, since taking the role of a step-parent is associated with anticipated relationship stress. 

When women in Europe become mothers this often negatively affects their labour market position. Even though employment levels of migrant women are comparably low in general, little is known how motherhood affects their working life. 

To understand how health policies can help improve our quality of life in older ages, it is important to look at health behaviours and their relation to health outcomes. In a recent study, Liili Abuladze and colleagues examined this relationship in Estonia, where life expectancies and self-rated health among older adults are comparatively low in Europe.

Using SHARE data from eleven countries, Liudmila Antonova, Tabea Bucher-Koenen and Fabrizio Mazzonna investigate the effects of economic crises that people experience during their prime working age (20-50) on their health later in life. The results show that when comparing individuals that experienced a strong recession (GDP dropped by at least 1%) and those that did not, people that experienced a recession rate their subjective health as worse and have worse objectively measured health. This effect is significantly stronger for people with low levels of education.