Blacksmith family
Project
The Life Course perspective combines a rigorous, critical, and theoretically flexible approach on intrinsic and classic sociological themes, on the one hand, and with methodological pluralism, on the other. It is the ambition of this project to create and consolidate bridges between the tradition and the future of life course studies by addressing one of its cherished, yet empirically “under-explored”, theoretical principles: “linked lives”, based on the idea that “each generation is bound to fateful decisions and events in the other’s life course”. Family will be used as a microcosm of the interdependence of life events, on the one hand, and of the crossed effects of life events of family members, on the other.
On a multidimensional approach, this project seeks to answer different, yet inter-related, questions about the interdependence of events throughout an individual’s life (including different areas of life) and within their family (both as a whole and towards specific family members). A quantitative approach will be used based on a multilevel and longitudinal data from EU-SILC, seeking to answer questions related with crossed effects between the areas of family, work, and well-being. This macro, comparative and European component will simultaneously provide information about the existence and characteristics of the specificity of the Portuguese case, which will be useful for further and simultaneous development of the project’s qualitative component.
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On the other hand, this project’s qualitative research intends to access the subjectivities and internationalities of action associated with life and family events experienced and their effects. Such phenomenon is a fundamental factor for the understanding of the links of interdependence between the events and the members of the same family. Biographical interviews will be carried out with life calendars and genealogical trees, which will be subjected to thematic content analysis and a holistic analysis. Furthermore, both a qualitative longitudinal analysis and a Multiple Correspondence Analysis will be carried out with the data collected with and through the life calendar. These analyses will be conducted on an individual and family level. A follow-up study will be conducted after two years to assess what subjectively and factually changed in the chain of interdependence of events in the family and to what are these changes owed.