Researchers have been interested in value similarities across family members for decades focusing specifically on the similarities between parents and their adolescent children. Adolescence, however, is a relatively short period of time strongly affected by changes and transitions; therefore, similarities observed between teenagers and their parents should not easily be assumed to persist throughout adulthood. To address this research gap, I inspected value similarities of parents and their adult children using data from multiple rounds of the German SOEP. To provide more details concerning the similarities, I inspected the similarities separately for mothers and fathers. I focused on values from three areas: material success, family life, and pro-social behavior. The preliminary results show that differences between mothers and their children, as well as fathers and their children, were the smallest for the importance of being there for others. At the same time, they were largest in terms of the importance of having children. Overall, on average neither parent seemed to be more similar to their child than the other. For some values, like the importance of a successful career, the differences were smaller for fathers; in others, such as the importance of owning a home, they were smaller for mothers. To provide an even wider overview, future analyses might also include intragenerational value similarities, meaning the value differences between parents and between the adult child and their siblings. This will allow additional insight concerning differences due to generational differences in society.

Social life consists of an interweaving of times (Rochabrún, 2021; Bidart, 2013) and relationships between human beings imply time exchanges. In this sense, the COVID-19 pandemic led to a reorganization of daily life, in particular, to a reconfiguration of the spatiotemporal relations between work and family. Thus, there were tensions and complementarities between work time and family time. In this context, teachers, central actors in educational systems, found themselves “between two fires”: they had to face the tension between the new needs and demands of work and family, which included the occurrence of unexpected biographical events (deaths, illnesses, anxiety, depression, among others).

The present study investigates the links between the temporalities of work and family, and their consequences on the mobilization of personal networks of Peruvian secondary education teachers during the COVID-19 pandemic. The methodological design was of a mixed nature (sociometric and qualitative). Two basic forms of relationship between teaching time and family time were found: confluence with displacement and confluence with complementarity. These forms of relationship led teachers to mobilize their personal support networks, which involved mobilizing the time of the members of these networks. This mobilization of time required coordination, but also gave rise to tensions between multiple times: the time of teachers, their partners, their children, their students, and their students’ parents. These results add to the literature on the relationships among personal networks, social support mobilization processes and time.

Forced migration disrupts refugees’ social networks and complicates partnership formation, especially for young refugees at an active partnership-forming age. These challenges are often heightened by skewed sex ratios among co-ethnics. In the absence of network data, little is known about the availability of social networks with romantic potential and the factors shaping such connections. We utilized newly collected ego-centric PARFORM data from Germany (2022–2023) to examine the presence of women in the networks of young male Syrian and Afghan refugees who arrived unmarried between 2014-2018, and whether these connections have the potential to develop into romantic relationships (N=1,139 egos; N=1,655 alters). We employed OLS and linear probability models to explore how the presence of up to three female contacts and potential romantic preference is shaped by three factors: 1) cultural, socio-economic, and personal characteristics of refugees and female contacts, 2) the availability of opportunity structures to meet women, and 3) societal expectations. Findings reveal, first, that male refugees with at least one woman in their social network were, on average, more educated and less religious. They had greater opportunity structures, such as a higher share of male friends and relatives in Germany. Second, among female network contacts—both among co-ethnics and German residents—refugees strongly preferred culturally endogamous women for potential partnerships. To achieve this, they sought online contacts and family advice. These findings suggest that whereas both cultural and socio-economic factors matter for access to female contacts, cultural factors outweigh socio-economic ones in shaping refugees’ romantic preferences.

Family networks are a valuable source of information and support influencing the parenting strategies of first-time parents, especially when it comes to arranging childcare. How family networks shape childcare strategies depends on the complex interplay between the gender, lineage, education, employment, and geographical proximity of available kin, among other factors. However, previous work studying how family networks shape childcare choices focuses on a few of such factors at a time, and often considers only relationships with close kin. We undertake a much more comprehensive empirical test. We adopt a machine learning perspective where we quantify the relevance of family networks in terms of their ability to make out-of-sample predictions of whether first-time parents use formal childcare services in the Netherlands. We leverage population-scale network data for over 200,000 first-time parents derived from administrative registers that allows us to trace the family relationships between all registered residents of the country in 2021. We construct the ego-networks of couples including step- and extended kin, and measure their composition and structure considering the availability of specific types of kin (e.g. maternal aunts), the existence of specific triads and higher-order motifs (e.g. grandmother-aunt-cousin), the generational structure of the network, its geographical dispersion, the educational and employment status of alters, and their care needs and burden. We model the relationship between childcare choices and this large set of predictors using random forest models with bagging and boosting to prevent overfitting, avoid multicollinearity, model non-linearity, and account for interactions between all predictors. By carefully analysing the results, we provide a comprehensive population-scale test of how close and extended kin matter in the transition to parenthood and subsequent childcare arrangements.

This research examines, cross-sectionally, the patterns of resources and strains in personal networks and psychological adjustment in a general population sample of 4000 young men and women in Switzerland, considering the different social markers of the transition to adulthood. We investigated the patterns of support and conflict interdependencies using a typological approach of structural interdependencies, jointly considering both structural features of support and conflict relationships within young adults’ networks. Six patterns of positive and negative interdependencies were identified, with some reflecting bonding and/or bridging types of network-based social capital, which certainly feature the availability of relational resources. However, other patterns, mixing supportive and conflict relationships, reflect more stress and strains than resources. A pattern also features the presence of sparse supportive and conflicting relationships. Our results showed that young adults embedded in personal networks featuring some bonding social capital had lower levels of distress. On the other hand, those integrated in patterns of interdependencies where stressful relationships are over-represented, or those in a pattern of sparse interdependencies, expressed high levels of distress. Our results showed that patterns or resources and strains matter for the mental health of young adults. We also assessed the extent to which such patterns of support and conflict interdependencies related to the social structure and some transition markers. Our results have policy implications in the current context where the increasing complexity of society makes the transition to adulthood increasingly challenging for a significant part of young people.