Serving as both a student textbook and a professional reference/handbook, this volume explores the statistical methods of examining time intervals between successive state transitions or events. Examples include: survival rates of patients in medical studies, unemployment periods in economic studies, or the period of time it takes a criminal to break the law after his release in a criminological study. The authors illustrate the entire research path required in the application of event-history analysis, from the initial problems of recording event-oriented data to the specific questions of...

As industrial societies increasingly evolve into knowledge-based economies, the importance of education as a lifelong process is greater than ever. This comprehensive book provides a state-of-the-art analysis of adult learning across the world and within varying institutional contexts. The expert contributors examine the structures of formal and non-formal adult learning in different countries, and investigate the levels of success those countries have experienced in encouraging participation and skill formation.

For much of the twentieth century, women lagged considerably behind men in their educational attainment. However, in recent decades, young women have become an important source of human capital for labor markets in modern societies, as well as potential competitors to the male workforce. This book asks whether or not women have been able to convert their educational success into gains on the labor market

From an international comparative perspective, this third book in the prestigious eduLIFE Lifelong Learning series provides a thorough investigation into how social inequalities arise during individuals' secondary schooling careers. Paying particular attention to the role of social origin and prior performance, it focuses on tracking and differentiation in secondary schooling examining the short- and long-term effects on inequality of opportunities. It looks at ways in which differentiation in secondary education might produce and reproduce social inequalities in educational opportunities and...

Recognizing that social change over recent decades has strengthened the need for early childhood education and care, this book seeks to answer what role this plays in creating and compensating for social inequalities in educational attainment. Compiling 13 cross-national and multidisciplinary empirical studies on three interrelated topics, this book explores how families from different social backgrounds decide between types of childcare, how important parental care and resources at home are for children's educational success, and the consequences of early education and care for children's...

Serving as both a student textbook and a professional reference/handbook, this volume explores the statistical methods of examining time intervals between successive state transitions or events. Examples include: survival rates of patients in medical studies, unemployment periods in economic studies, or the period of time it takes a criminal to break the law after his release in a criminological study. The authors illustrate the entire research path required in the application of event-history analysis, from the initial problems of recording event-oriented data to the specific questions of...

 The relationship between rational choice theory and large-scale data analysis has become an important issue for sociologists. Though rational choice theory is well established in both sociology and economics, its influence on quantitative empirical sociology has been surprisingly limited. This book examines why there is hardly a link between the t

This is the first book to systematically track postwar changes in family formation in Western Europe and the United States. Cohabitation and motherhood outside of marriage have become more widespread at the same time that women’s social roles are evolving. Women are attaining higher levels of education, marrying at an older age, more frequently working outside the home, and have more reproductive freedom due to new advances in contraception. In this original collection of essays, sociologists and demographers from eight Western European countries and the United States use longitudinal data...