The volume is the first to take a life-course approach to the study of domestic work in Italy. It provides a coherent and systemic overview of time spent on housework, childcare and adult care over the life course. While most previous research has focused on the time adult women and men spend on housework and the division of domestic chores among partners, this unique contribution studies the amount of time spent on chores by Italians in different phases of the life course. It addresses relevant aspects often neglected in time use studies, such as the socialization to domestic chores among children, teenagers and young adults living in the parental home and the reproduction of gender inequalities in housework at later stages of the life course.

Building on the success of the 2003 Handbook of the Life Course, this second volume identifies future directions for life course research and policy. The introductory essay and the chapters that make up the five sections of this book, show consensus on strategic “next steps” in life course studies. These next steps are explored in detail in each section: Section I, on life course theory, provides fresh perspectives on well-established topics, including cohorts, life stages, and legal and regulatory contexts. It challenges life course scholars to move beyond common individualistic paradigms. Section II highlights changes in major institutional and organizational contexts of the life course. It draws on conceptual advances and recent empirical findings to identify promising avenues for research that illuminate the interplay between structure and agency. It examines trends in family, school, and workplace, as well as contexts that deserve heightened attention, including the military, the criminal justice system, and natural and man-made disaster. The remaining three sections consider advances and suggest strategic opportunities in the study of health and development throughout the life course. They explore methodological innovations, including qualitative and three-generational longitudinal research designs, causal analysis, growth curves, and the study of place. Finally, they show ways to build bridges between life course research and public policy.

Using a theoretical orientation, this book explores the life course approach to family life - including parent-child, spousal, and sibling relationships. It reflects the diversity represented in contemporary families as they grapple with changes and transitions in family relationships during the life cycle.

What are the most effective methods for doing life-course research? In this volume, the field's founders and leaders answer this question, giving readers tips on: the art and method of the appropriate research design; the collection of life-history data; and the search for meaningful patterns to be found in the results.

This Open Access book argues that Southern European countries offer valuable, though historically overlooked, knowledge regarding intimate citizenship. Guided by the fundamental sociological question of how change takes place and, concomitantly, how law and social policy adjust to and/or shape the practices and expectations of individuals in the sphere of intimacy, this edited volume explores partnering, parenting and friendship issues from the perspective of lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and queer people in Italy, Portugal and Spain. Chapters offer a cross-national understanding of the relationship between everyday practices of intimacy amongst LGBTQ people and national legal, political and policy contexts in terms of the recognition of otherwise ‘intimate strangers’. The book contributes to further theoretical and policy debates about citizenship, care and choice, as well as, more broadly, sexuality, welfare, health and justice. This book will be of interest to scholars across Gender and Feminist Studies as well as Citizenship Studies, Law, Policy, and Politics.

This edited book draws from work that focuses on the act of telling family stories, as well as their content and structure. The process of telling family stories is linked to central aspects of development, including language acquisition, affect regulation, and family interaction patterns. This book extends across traditional developmental psychology, personality theory, and family studies. Drawing broadly on the epigenetic framework for individual development articulated by Erik Erikson, as well as on conceptions of the family life cycle, the editors bring together contemporary examples of psychological research on family stories and their implications for development and change at different points in the life course. The book is divided into sections that focus on family stories at different points in the life cycle, from early childhood and the beginnings of narrative skill, through adolescence, young adulthood, midlife, and then mature adulthood and its intergenerational meaning. During each of these periods of the life cycle, research focusing on individual development within an Eriksonian framework of ego strengths and virtues is highlighted. The dynamic role of family stories is also featured here, with work exploring the links between family process, intergenerational attachment, and storytelling. Sociocultural theories that emphasize how such development is situated in the wider cultural context are also featured in several chapters. This broad lifespan developmental focus serves to integrate the exciting diversity of this work and foster further questions and research in the emerging field of family narrative. The book is intended primarily for researchers and advanced-level students in the fields of developmental and personality psychology, as well as those in family studies and in gerontology. It may also be of interest to those in the helping professions who are concerned with family therapy and family issues, and may--due to its content and illustrative material--have appeal to a wider market of the lay public. The chapters are written in a readily accessible style and the analyses are presented in a fairly non-technical way. Because family stories are charted across the lifespan, it would be a suitable companion book to a more traditional lifespan textbook in certain courses.

The essential reference for human development theory, updated and reconceptualized The Handbook of Child Psychology and Developmental Science, a four-volume reference, is the field-defining work to which all others are compared. First published in 1946, and now in its Seventh Edition, the Handbook has long been considered the definitive guide to the field of developmental science. Volume 4: Ecological Settings and Processes in Developmental Systems is centrally concerned with the people, conditions, and events outside individuals that affect children and their development. To understand children's development it is both necessary and desirable to embrace all of these social and physical contexts. Guided by the relational developmental systems metatheory, the chapters in the volume are ordered them in a manner that begins with the near proximal contexts in which children find themselves and moving through to distal contexts that influence children in equally compelling, if less immediately manifest, ways. The volume emphasizes that the child's environment is complex, multi-dimensional, and structurally organized into interlinked contexts; children actively contribute to their development; the child and the environment are inextricably linked, and contributions of both child and environment are essential to explain or understand development. Understand the role of parents, other family members, peers, and other adults (teachers, coaches, mentors) in a child's development Discover the key neighborhood/community and institutional settings of human development Examine the role of activities, work, and media in child and adolescent development Learn about the role of medicine, law, government, war and disaster, culture, and history in contributing to the processes of human development The scholarship within this volume and, as well, across the four volumes of this edition, illustrate that developmental science is in the midst of a very exciting period. There is a paradigm shift that involves increasingly greater understanding of how to describe, explain, and optimize the course of human life for diverse individuals living within diverse contexts. This Handbook is the definitive reference for educators, policy-makers, researchers, students, and practitioners in human development, psychology, sociology, anthropology, and neuroscience.