News and Updates

Exploring the early environment and childhood development at the second DIAL workshop at Newcastle

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Newcastle conference report 13. – 14th January 2020

The second DIAL thematic workshop – Education for Life – was organized on 13th and 14th of January 2020 at the Newcastle University. Researchers from the UK, Germany, the Netherlands, France and Finland gathered together to present and discuss their ongoing research. The presentations of this two-day workshop covered topics such as socioeconomic differences in child development, with a special focus on linguistic and behavioural development, preterm babies, maternal mental health and social mobility. The conference finished with a vivid discussion on science communication to political actors and practitioners.

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Aleksi Karhula wins the 2019 ALCR Young Scholar Award

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DIAL congratulates PhD Aleksi Karhula for winning the 2019 Advances in Life Course Research Young Scholar Award with his paper:

Karhula, A., Erola, J., Raab, M. & Fasang, A. 2019. Destination as a process: Sibling similarity in early socioeconomic trajectories. Advances in Life Course Research, 40: 85-98.

Karhula and his colleagues studied sibling similarity in their early socioeconomic trajectories. A  pronounced similarity in the early socioeconomic trajectories was found, in particular in disadvantaged and advantaged trajectories. The study concludes that social mobility measures that focus solely on final outcomes risk underestimating the full extent of the social origin effects.

You can read the paper here!

Do Nordic countries live up to their promise of creating fairer and more equal societies?

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In the first Episode of Series 2 of our podcast looking at research emerging from the Equal Lives project, we talk to Marika Jalovaara from the University of Türku in Finland and Anette Fasang from Humboldt University in Berlin about their research, Family Life Courses, Gender and Mid-Life earnings. The research explores whether the reputation of Nordic countries for having family friendly policies  that create a fairer and more equal society is deserved. Using register data from Finland, the researchers look at the earnings of adults based on their family lifecourse and reveal 2 groups of young adults who should be a focus for policy makers and researchers going forward. 

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Alessandro Di Nallo: Job loss and divorce: worse for disadvantaged couples?

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In Episode 12 of the DIAL Podcast, Alessandro Di Nallo from the University of Lausanne talks about his research looking at the links between job loss and divorce for couples to see if the likelihood of separating is greater for more or less advantaged couples.

The heterogeneous effect of job loss on union dissolution. Panel evidence from Germany, Switzerland and the UK is research presented at the DIAL Mid Term Conference in June 2019.

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Dilnoza Muslimova: Birth rank – does it make a difference?

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In Episode 11 of the DIAL Podcast, Dilnoza Muslimova from the Erasmus University in Rotterdam talks about birth rank, genes and how well children get on in life and whether and how parental investment matters. 

Birth rank, genes and later life outcomes was presented at the DIAL Mid Term Conference in June 2019 and is part of the NORFACE-funded project Gene-Environment Interplay in the Generation of Health and Education Inequalities. 

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Michael Grätz: Siblings and their incomes – the same or different over the life course?

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In Episode 10 of the Dial Podcast, Michael Grätz from the University of Stockholm talks about sibling similarity in income and what that tells us about their life chances later on.  The research, which uses Administrative Data in Sweden and is published as a Working Paper, was also presented at the DIAL mid term conference in June 2019.

Transcript

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Nirosha Varghese: Sleep tight! Does a baby’s sleep matter for how they get on at school later on?

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In Episode 9 of the DIAL Podcast, Nirosha Varghese from Bocconi University discusses her research looking at the links between early childhood sleep and how children get on at school later on.

Further information:

Early childhood sleep and later cognitive human capital is Marie Curie funded research analysing the relationship between early sleep problems and later cognitive outcomes in a life course perspective. It was presented at the DIAL Mid-Term Conference in June 2019.

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The many faces of inequality – highlights from the dial mid-term conference

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This summary captures a three-day programme of presentations and panel discussions at the mid-term conference organised by Dynamics of Inequality Across the Life-course (DIAL), which took place from 6–8 June 2019 in Turku, Finland. The conference brought together over 90 researchers from many of the DIAL research projects as well as representatives from various international and European institutions such as OECD, COFACE, Eurofound and ETUC. Numerous topics were covered at the conference, including intergenerational inequalities and inequalities related to education, labour market, health, partnership and family-life. The conference was preceded by a pre-conference on “Introduction to the German Socio-economic Panel Study (SOEP)” with Daniel Graeber on Wednesday.

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Áine Ní Léime: The road to retirement – is it an equal one for people in sedentary and physically demanding jobs?

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In Episode 8 of the DIAL Podcast, Dr Áine Ní Léime from the National University of Ireland talks about her research looking at the work trajectories of people in sedentary and physically demanding jobs and what that means for their health as they approach retirement in a policy context where they are expected to work longer.

Áine is a member of the DIAL programme of research DAISIE project which is using similar methods and approaches to those discussed in this podcast to look at the gendered impacts of policies aimed at extending working life (EWL) in the Czech Republic, Ireland, Sweden, Switzerland and  the UK.

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Rachel Robinson: Optimist or pessimist? Pre-term personalities and later life chances

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In Episode 7 of the DIAL Podcast, Rachel Robinson from the University of Helsinki discusses her research looking at whether pre-term babies are more likely to be pessimists or optimists and the implications for how they get on as young adults. The research is part of the NORFACE-funded PremLife Project  looking at adaptation and life outcomes of preterm and low birth weight children across the lifespan.

Further information:

Rachel Robinson was discussing research presented at the DIAL Mid-Term Conference in June 2019.

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