Projects
Projects FNS
WELLWAYS: Critical events and transitions in family and work and multidimensional wellbeing
2019 - 2021
Applicant : Laura Bernardi, Marieke Voorpostel
The tremendous changes in both work and family domains have had major consequences for inequality in wellbeing in contemporary European societies, raising new and pressing challenges. Family trajectories have become more diverse as marriage rates decrease while at the same time divorce rates, births outside marriage, lone parenthood, and the prevalence of complex blended families increase. Major changes in the work domain include declining employment security, growing flexibility and uncertain social mobility as well as increasing blurred boundaries between work and private life, causing these two domains to be ever more intertwined. The increasingly diverse family and work trajectories and their growing interdependence produces a large range of life course configurations whose impact on wellbeing is largely unknown. While previous research clearly demonstrates the need of jointly assessing work and family influences on wellbeing, it offers little insights into the importance of the timing and concentration of critical events for different wellbeing outcomes across social groups. WELLWAYS investigates how professional and family trajectories jointly produce inequality, by taking a dynamic approach to the life course and a multidimensional approach to wellbeing. The overall project aims are to explain a) how some individuals are at risk of accumulating disadvantages over the life course, producing lower levels of wellbeing and a reduced capacity to recover from life hazards; b) what is the role of individual resources in moderating the production of social inequalities. WELLWAYS builds on life course scholarship, which highlights the need to consider life courses as made of multiple and interdependent trajectories, and on the stress process scholarship, which theorize the negative effects of experiencing multiple hardships (stress proliferation).
NCCR LIVES IP5 : Family ties and vulnerability processes: Network-wide properties, agency and life-course relational reserves
2019 - 2022
Applicant : C. Rossier (UNIGE), L. Bernardi (UNIL)
The research group focuses on family relations as key resources as well as potential stressors in individual processes of vulnerability and resilience at different stages of the life course (childhood, adulthood, old age). The psychological, public health and epidemiological literature of the last few decades has given ample empirical evidence that interpersonal ties and social support, among which family is central, greatly improve individuals' physical and psychological well-being. This literature has also underlined that these positive effects on health and well-being are conditional on quality ties, the presence of poor-quality relations being as or even more stressful than the absence of relationship.
We explore in a more systematic fashion how family and interpersonal ties and their effect on psychological well-being are socially situated. Our general objectives are three-fold:
(1) studies considering the global effect of being embedded in configurations of family relationships on psychosocial health or well-being;
(2) understand the role of individual agency in shaping family/personal networks in order to adapt to the consequence of critical transitions (such as lone parenthood or re-partnering);
(3) structure our investigation of the long-term (and resource absorbing) constitution of relational capital, and of its depletion and intensive use in stressful life stages, we shall closely consider critical propositions associated with the reserve approach concerning accumulation, activation and thresholds of resources throughout the life course.
NCCR LIVES IP208 / IP8 : Family configurations and the life course
2011 - 2018
Applicant : C. Rossier (UNIGE)
Other partners : L. Bernardi, C. Burton-Jeangros, D. Joye, E. Widmer, G. Aeby, B. Cheval, O. Ganjour, J.-A. Gauthier, M. Girardin, E. Nada, G. Potarca, M. Sapin, G. Viry, M. Voorpostel
The nuclear family, particularly within marriage, has been regarded for a long time as a resilient group against expectations, constraints and hazards stemming from the social context. The pluralisation of life courses has, however, made families change, becoming more diverse and less predictable. IP8 in the first phase of the NCCR LIVES focused on the impact of non-normative events on conjugal quality and conjugal permanence.
During the second phase (2015-2018), IP208 expands the research issues by doing research on family ambivalence and family conflicts as life stressors in their own right, and by considering family forms beyond couples living and parenting together. Because the diversity of family and personal configurations needs to be understood in a comparative perspective across countries, IP208 will support the development of new tools and data collections worldwide.
In order to analyse non-standard family forms and their link to vulnerability, IP208 uses data from the Survey on families and generations, which the Swiss Federal Statistical Office conducted in 2013.
More information here .
European Programs
Families and Societies
2013 - 2017
Applicant : Stockholm Univ.
What will families look like in the future? Are existing social- and family policies compatible with changes in family patterns? These and related questions are addressed in the large-scale integrating project FamiliesAndSocieties - Changing families and sustainable societies: Policy contexts and diversity over the life course and across generations, coordinated by Stockholm University.
The main objectives of the project are:
- to investigate the diversity of family forms, relationships, and life courses in Europe.
- to assess the compatibility of existing policies with family changes.
- to contribute to evidence-based policy-making.
The project will extend our knowledge on how policies promote well-being, inclusion and sustainable societal development among families.
More information available on the project website .
Others projects
Observatory on Family Dynamics
2017 - 2021
grant-giving organisation : Canton de Vaud, Ville de Lausanne (Switzerland)
Applicant : Laura Bernardi
Other partners : Pascal Maeder (HES-SO)
Zukunft mit Kindern Fertilität und gesellschaftliche Entwiklung
2009 - 2012
grant-giving organisation : Berlin Brandeburgischen Akademie der Wissenschaften and the Nationalen Akademieder Wissenschaften Leopoldina (Germany)
Explaining Low Fertility in Italy (ELFI)
2004 - 2007
grant-giving organisation : US National Institute of Health and the National Science Foundation (U.S.A.)
Applicant : L. Bernardi, D. Kertzer, M. White (Brown Univ.), M. Barbagli (Istituto Cattaneo)
The ethnographic fieldwork portion of the project - interviews with women of reproductive age, and when available their partners and mothers - was initiated and completed in 2006. For each of four Italian cities (Padua, Bologna, Cagliari, and Naples) studied ethnographically by trained anthropologists, both a working-class and a middle-class neighborhood were identified. These interviews (349 in number) have been transcribed without identifiers. All interviews have been coded and assigned 'attributes' (or nominative variables, such as gender, civil/religious status of marriage, etc.) using the qualitative data analysis software (NVIVO), and these reside in secure electronic project folders. This large body of qualitative interview data is now complete and ready for use across the international collaborative units. Preliminary research reveals the particular significance of family ties in Italy, the fundamental role played by gender systems, and the specific cultural, socio-economic, and politic contexts in which fertility behavior and parenting are embedded.
Social Influence on Union and Fertility Decisions (Soziale Einflüsse auf das Entscheidungsverhalten über Partnerschaft und Fertilität)
2004 - 2006
grant-giving organisation : Max Planck Gesellschaft (Germany)
Applicant : L. Bernardi
Other partners : Research Program Familienpanel of the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgesellschaft - DFG)
Contracts and Mandates
Study on single-parent family in Neuchâtel Canton
2018 - 2020
grant-giving organisation : Canton de Neuchâtel (Switzerland)
Applicant : Laura Bernardi
Advisor for the European Household Panel
grant-giving organisation : Eurostat (Luxembourg)
- on "Gender & Gender Studies" aspects
Consequences of separation and divorce
2017 - 2020
grant-giving organisation : Ville de Lausanne, DSAS Vaud (Department of Health and social affairs), SPJ Vaud (Youth Protection Service) (Switzerland)
Applicant : Laura Bernardi
- faisability study
