Federal Institute for Population Research

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Einsame junge Frau steht auf Seebrücke und schaut in die Ferne (refer to: Loneliness: Especially younger people are feeling increasingly lonely) | Source: © fotoduets/stock.adobe.com

FReDA Policy BriefLoneliness: Especially younger people are feeling increasingly lonely

In the last five years, the feeling of loneliness has increased in Germany. Today, one in three people between the ages of 18 and 53 feels lonely at least some of the time – including many younger people under 30, as new BiB analyses show.

Miscellaneous PublicationsDay care availability and awareness of gendered economic risks: How they shape work and care norms

Büchau, Silke; Philipp, Marie-Fleur; Schober, Pia S.; Spiess, C. Katharina (2022)

BiB Working Paper 7/2022. Wiesbaden: Bundesinstitut für Bevölkerungsforschung

Family policies not only provide money, time and infrastructure to families, but also convey normative assumptions about what is considered desirable or acceptable in paid work and family care. This study conceptualises and empirically investigates how priming respondents with brief media report-like information on existing day care policy entitlements and the economic consequences of maternal employment interruptions may change personal normative beliefs about parental work-care arrangements. Furthermore, we analyse whether these effects differ between groups of respondents assumed to vary in their degree of affectedness by the information as well as previous knowledge. The theoretical framework builds on the concept of normative policy feedback effects (Soroka and Wlezien, 2010; Gangl and Ziefle, 2015) combined with social norm theory (Bicchieri, 2017) and human cognition theories (Petty and Cacioppo, 1986; Evans and Stanovich, 2013). The study is based on a fully randomized survey experiment in Wave 12 of the German Family Panel (pairfam) and applies linear and ordinal logistic regressions with cluster-robust standard errors to a sample of 5,783 respondents. Our results suggest that priming respondents with information on day care policy and long-term economic risks of maternal employment interruptions increases acceptance of intensive day care use across the full sample and especially for mothers with children below school entry age. It further increases support for longer hours spent in paid work among childless women and mothers with school-aged children. Norms regarding paternal working hours are largely unaffected by the information given in this survey experiment.

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