Completed projects

Research team Fassa Farinaz (Unil), Storari Chiara (Unil)


This research project examines how teachers make use of the teaching aids for gender equality education and how this is connected with their own assessments of the equality issue and with their working environment.The study uses a mixed-methods approach: 1) interviews with policy makers in education and gender equality (N=21) are carried out in order to investigate the specific situation in each canton and identify how much importance the different cantons attach to this school topic. 2) A sample of teachers and school principals in the French-speaking region of Switzerland will be surveyed by questionnaires. Interviews with teachers will complement the data and provide information on the deeper associations between values, gender equality concepts and teaching practice.


Research team : Jacques-Antoine Gauthier (Unil), Dominique Joye (Unil), Eric Widmer (Unige). Two PhD students participating in this research as part of their thesis, Gaëlle Aeby (Unil) and Pierre-Alain Roch (Unil).

Family trajectories and social networks: a configurational perspective of the life course


The Family tiMes survey focuses on important changes, but also on continuities that are specific to family, relational and occupational life courses of individuals belonging to the birth cohorts of 1950-1955 and 1970-1975. For each respective cohort, a sample of 400 individuals, representative of the Swiss residential population, has been interviewed. Ego-network and sequence analysis will be employed. This study has been developed in collaboration with Karin Wall and colleagues from the University of Lisbon. The same research design has been applied to a comparable population in Portugal in 2010 and will allow international comparisons. 



Research team : Caroline Roberts (Unil), Dominique Joye (Unil), Guy Elcheroth (Unil), and other collaborators within LIVES


Several projects within LIVES are planning surveys of different sub-groups of the population resident in Switzerland. Though the specific focus of the planned research varies, the studies share some common methodological challenges, including:


1) Sampling ‘hard-to-reach’ populations; 
2) Risk of differential nonresponse across important sub-groups, and attrition in longitudinal studies;
 3) Collection of retrospective data - event histories and retrospective evaluations of personal well-being across the life course;
 4) Difficulties associated with conducting surveys in Switzerland: telephone under-coverage and the high cost of face-to-face interviewing, which have increased the demand for mixed mode data collection.


In this project, we aim to evaluate the impact of efforts to address these challenges on data quality. Analyzing questionnaire data alongside panel data, and data from sampling registers, the aim is to improve knowledge of how to optimize survey designs for different populations in Switzerland, focusing on the relation between data collection methods, survey errors and costs.


LIVES - Swiss National Centre of Competence in Research  
 

Équipe de recherche : Lavinia Gianettoni (Unil), Dinah Gross (Unil), Jérôme Blondé (Unil)

L’objectif de ce projet est d’analyser l’impact des enjeux liés au genre et à l’orientation sexuelle sur les parcours de formation professionnelle et les ruptures d’apprentissage. La revue de la littérature montre qu'en Suisse et en Europe plusieurs recherches se sont intéressées à l'analyse des parcours de formation des jeunes et au risque de décrochage en fonction du type de formation suivie et de sa typicité du point de vue du genre. Peu de travaux ont par contre abordé ces problématiques en s’intéressant explicitement aux effets conjoints du genre et de l’orientation sexuelle des jeunes, alors même que la littérature scientifique suggère que l’orientation sexuelle et/ou le vécu de discriminations homophobes influence les processus d’orientation professionnelle. Les résultats du pré-test réalisé pour cette recherche montrent que le vécu de discriminations sexistes ou homophobes joue un rôle important dans la volonté de poursuivre une formation professionnelle. Ce projet vise à valider ces résultats dans le cadre d’une étude longitudinale intégrant également d'autres facteurs d'influence des parcours de formation, notamment le contexte plus ou moins sexiste et homophobe des filières de formation et le rôle du réseau social des jeunes. Pour cela, 1000 jeunes en formation professionnelle dans le canton de Genève seront suivis par questionnaire à trois reprises durant 3 ans. Un sous-échantillon de 40 jeunes en formation atypiques (garçons suivant une formation majoritairement investie par les filles et filles suivant une formation majoritairement investie par les garçons) ou non hétérosexuel-le-s sera interrogé par entretien semi-directifs à deux reprises. 

The impact of plant closure in manufacturing on displaced worker's trajectories

Research team : Véronique Addor (HESGE), René Schwendimann (UNI Basel), Jacques-Antoine Gauthier (Unil), Adeline Paignon (HESGE), Dalit Jäckel (UNI Basel), André Jeannin (sociologue), Boris Wernli (FORS, Unil)

Funding : Fonds national Suisse de la recherche scientifique (FNS), Haute école spécialisée de Suisse occidentale Genève (HES-SO/Genève), Observatoire suisse de la santé (Obsan), Secrétariat d’Etat à la formation, à la recherche et à l’innovation (SEFRI), Office fédéral de la santé publique (OFSP)

The current nursing graduate workforce in Switzerland covers less than half of the needs and does not compensate the early departure of experienced nurses leaving their institution or even the field of nurse care.Without specific measures, this situation of workforce shortage will grow worse due to the increasing demand of care services (ageing population, chronical diseases etc.) along with a decreasing offer in the sector of care (retirement of the baby boomer nurses, low attractiveness of the nursing occupations, decreasing number of nurses educated in Switzerland).Data concerning the workforce in the health sector and about nurses in particular are incomplete. We do not know how many nurses are currently active on the labor market, as well as the volume of their participation in the nursing sector. These data are indeed essential to assess the needs in nursing workforce for 2020 and beyond.

Research team : Daniel Oesch (Unil), Isabel Baumann (Unil)



This project examines the social and economic consequences of the closure of five large manufacturing plants in Switzerland for displaced workers’ lives. The question addressed is how this has affected their occupational trajectories. The empirical analysis is based on a sample of 1000 workers who fill out a questionnaire two years after plant closure. The first goal is to find out if and where these displaced workers have found a job. The second goal is to know whether plant closure was accompanied by downward social mobility in terms of occupation and earnings: were displaced workers able to maintain their living standards or did plant closure leave a durable scar? Finally, the project wishes to identify both the categories of workers that succeeded in making the transition to an equivalent job and the categories of workers that lost out from plant closure.

_{Professional aspirations and orientations of girls and boys towards the end of compulsory school: what determinants for more equality?} 

Research team : Dominique Joye (Unil), Jacques-Antoine Gauthier (Unil), Lavinia Gianettoni (Unil), Carolilna Carvalho Arruda (Unil), Dinah Gross (Unil), Edith Guilley (SRED) Elisabeth Isaeiva Moubarak Nahra (SRED), Karin Müller (SRED)

In Switzerland, the professional aspirations of girls and boys are still gender related: they are oriented according to the idea that there are male and female occupations. This research project is based on a survey among pupils in secondary schools, their parents and their teachers, and on semi-structured interviews with careers guidance counsellors and other professionals of occupational orientation. The aim is to determine the different causes of these differences – which contribute to the (re)production of gender inequalities – in order to better identify effective tools to prevent it. Our main hypothesis is that institutional – social capital and the education system, for example – along with psychosocial factors work together in the reproduction of sexual roles and identities, and contribute, in turn, to the « sexual division of occupational orientation ».
 

Research team : Doris Hanappi (NCCR LIVES, research associate LINES), Valérie-Anne Ryser (FORS, University Lausanne), Laura Bernardi (deputy director of the NCCR LIVES, Director of LINES), Jean-Marie LeGoff (LINES, University of Lausanne)

Employment and fertility intentions are fundamental mechanisms in the social fabric, and the relationship between them can have profound, long-term effects on a variety of institutions, including the education system, the family (childrearing, care for the elderly), and the labor market itself. In postindustrial societies, empirical evidence shows that there is a strong association between employment uncertainty and the formation and realization of fertility intentions, but this has not yet been systematically examined in the Swiss context. In this project, we examine the impact of precariousness as manifestation of such uncertainty on fertility intentions, drawing on panel data (e.g. Swiss Household Panel data). We are especially interested in the age and gender-specific effects of multiple, combined indicators of precariousness on stability or change of intentions. Our research links the study of fertility intentions and their realization to the precariousness debate paralleling recent labor market reforms, and thereby advances knowledge about the demographic response to market flexibilization and economic turbulence. Methodologically, it advances the modeling of employment uncertainty to gain a more differentiated understanding of its effects on reproductive decision-making.

Research team : Patrick Arni (IZA Bonn), Giuliano Bonoli (IDHEAP), Rafael Lalive (HEC Unil), Daniel Oesch (Unil), Anna Von Ow (Unil), Nicolas Turtschi (IDHEAP)


 

This project is part of the LIVES-programme and empirically analyzes the role of social networks in getting a job. More precisely, it examines how networks can help the unemployed find jobs. The empirical analysis is based on a sample of all individuals newly registered as unemployed in the Canton of Vaud over a two-month period (February and March 2012). These unemployed people are asked to fill in two questionnaires on their social contacts and their job-search strategy at the very beginning and the end of their unemployment spell. Our hypothesis is that social networks not only serve as an important channel through which to leave unemployment, but also one that is not fully exploited. By shedding light on how social networks can help – or hinder – the unemployed in finding their way back into the labour market, the project aims to improve our understanding of a particularly critical transition in the life course.
 

Le projet Résiliences constitue avant tout un espace d’échange pour explorer de nouveaux concepts et développer de manière créative des idées de recherche originales. Il rassemble une dizaine des psychologues sociaux autour d’un intérêt commun pour les mécanismes de la résilience et leurs liens avec les inégalités sociales, les expériences migratoires, les conflits armés ou d’autres traumatismes collectifs. Dans l’histoire du groupe, l’enquête TRACES, réalisée en 2006 sur les expériences de guerre en ex-Yougoslavie et leur impact formateur sur une génération, a fonctionnée comme recherche fondatrice. Depuis, son journal club a fonctionné comme laboratoire d’idées qui a inspiré et accompagné des projets de recherche ambitieux comme Trajectoires en Contextes  ou Mémoires Plurielles et la conception d’outils méthodologiques novateurs. A partir de 2016-17, le groupe intègre, plusieurs fois par semestre, des mémorants pour discuter de leur travail en cours et de recherches actuelles qui y sont liées.

Research team : Fabien Foureault (Post-doc), Lena Ajdacic (Doctorante), Steven Piguet (Informaticien)

The aim of this project is to study the rise of “capital market intermediaries” as a new financial elite and to investigate the access to this group, its internal integration and the spread of its power beyond the financial sector. 

Capital market intermediaries, the senior managers or partners at the helm of large investment funds, hedge funds or private equity firms are an increasingly influential social group. Since the 1970s, starting from the US and the UK, the world economy has undergone a thorough process of financialization: after the collapse of the Bretton-Woods system, increasing financial deregulation allowed the financial industry to develop new instruments (securities, derivatives); firms increasingly funded themselves on the financial market and “profits primarily accrue(d) through financial channels rather than through trade and commodity production” (Arrighi, 1994: 174). Financialization is closely linked to – and has been fuelled by – a radical transformation of large firms, known as maximization of shareholder value. This business practice consists of concentrating on core competencies, restructuring, mergers and acquisition or hostile takeovers to raise the net worth of the firm and to distribute it to the shareholders. The shareholder value conception of the firm led to a reshuffling of the role and the power of different groups within the economic elite. We observe a relative decline of influence of top executive mangers and the relative rise of “capital market intermediaries” (Folkman et al., 2007). This group, even though endowed with a large influence on corporate strategies, political discourse and the legal framework, is surprisingly little know in sociological terms. 

Therefore, based on a prosopgraphical sample of about 1200 financial managers of the globally most important investment firms and 1000 managers of the world’s largest non-financial firms at two bench-mark years (2000 and 2015), this research projects raises three research questions: 1. What are the pathways of access to senior positions as capital market intermediaries in terms of educational level, type of education and nationality? 2. Are the financial elites different from traditional corporate managers and do they, internally, form a homogenous and cohesive group? 3. Is the power of financial elites restricted to the financial domain or does it spread to the administrative, political or academic sphere? These questions are studied with an analytical framework consisting of three dimensions of comparison: the differences between “financial elites” and “managerial elites”, the internal differences between different groups of financial elites (investment fund managers, hedge fund managers, pension fund managers, private equity managers, sovereign wealth fund managers) and the historical differences between 2000 and 2015. 

In terms of methodology, this project will collect a coherent body of data about the organizational positions, the careers and socio-demographic characteristics of these new financial elites and develop a series of innovative indicators of cohesion and influence. It will study the education, the meeting places and the (multi-)positionality of capital intermediaries with a combination of regression analyses, sequence analysis and multiple correspondence analysis. The results will make a valuable contribution to the sociology of elites, economic sociology and the sociology of inequality and, beyond academia, stimulate the public debate about the power of shareholders and capital market intermediaries – both in Switzerland and internationally. 

During the last decade of the twentieth century, people in the former Yugoslavia lived through a period of dramatic social change. Traces of war and political violence remain tangible even twenty years after the most tragic events. The TRACES (for “Transition to Adulthood and Collective Experiences Survey) project investigates since 2004 how people and communities strive to meet the challenges of the aftermath of violent conflict by redefining social practices and shared worldviews. To open new avenues in social scientists abilities to reconstitute collective experiences in the former Yugoslavia and to overcome some of the limitations in our ways of looking at ethnic violence stemming from previously available data sources, a new data set has been constituted in 2006 within an SNF-funded project. Unique in its kind, the resulting dataset has two main components: first, life events calendar data from a representative sample of people across all of the former Yugoslavia (N = 3’975) and, second, extensive data on political attitudes and social worldviews from members of the 1968-1974 birth cohort (N= 2’254), who entered adulthood during the main war period. Currently, the TRACES team continues to exploit this rich dataset, to stimulate new initiatives of secondary analysis and, more generally, to broaden the study of collective identity, shared worldviews and their relation to past victimisation and current segregation in the region, by combining elite- and mass-level perspectives.

Fieldwork and methodological documentation 

Access to the survey data

Collective book presenting the main findings  

The Research Group on Collective Vulnerability and Social Change is part of the Institute of Social Sciences at the University of Lausanne. Its members share a common interest in the way collective calamities such as war or social crisis affect the fabric of community life. Their joint research activities organise around several core questions: What makes collective vulnerability different from the sum of individual fragilities? Why do the disruption of social practices and the spread of moral ambiguity constitute traumatic experiences in themselves? When do collective catastrophes provide an impetus for progressive social change? Which collective resources can people draw upon to resist spirals of anomie or to overcome historic legacies of violent breakdown?

Over the last decade, these questions have motivated a variety of studies in the following subfields: 

• Collective vulnerability, conflict and human rights
• Collective values, social stability and change 
• Political nationalism and ethnic violence
• Collective resistance and disobedience 
• Shared beliefs and community resilience 
• The combination of micro- and macro-level approaches

However, the Transition to Adulthood and Collective Experiences Surveys (TRACES) conducted in 2005 and 2006 across the entire region of the former Yugoslavia, with the aim to document collective exposure to violent breakdown and the impact of war on one generation, has played an outstanding role in the history of the research group. Currently, as two doctoral theses drawing on the material gathered from this project and an edited synthesis of the overall findings are in their final stages, the group is preparing its own transition and exploring ways to apply theoretical models and methodological tools yielded by previous research to new sites and phenomena.

The research group is firmly rooted in European social psychology and is guided by an understanding of social psychology as an interdisciplinary crossroad in the midst of the social sciences, rather than as a sub-discipline of psychology. The group is linked to the Lausanne Life Course and Inequality Research Centre and to the Swiss National Centre of Competence in Research , ‘LIVES – Overcoming vulnerability ’. Its members are involved in a dense network of scientific collaborations with excellent international research groups. 

Research team: Laura Bernardi (Unil), Chiara Comolli (Unil), Marieke Voorpostel (Fors), Ariane Pailhé (Ined), Emmanuelle Cambois (Ined)

Health and well-being are not equally distributed in society. WELLWAYS investigates how events and transitions in the family and employment domains, which significantly influence health and well-being, contribute to this inequality. We study individuals’  life course to understand whether and to what extent family and work-related events interact in increasing disparities in well-being in Switzerland and France.

The main objective of the project is to explain how some individuals have a higher risk to accumulate disadvantages along their life course resulting in lower well-being and reduced health. We use data from several large surveys conducted in Switzerland and France which include information about the development of employment and family as well as information on individual levels of well-being for longer than two decades. Examining what happens in the dimensions of work and family simultaneously, we explore to what extent disadvantages in each of the two domains are interdependent. In addition, we distinguish individuals and families with fewer resources from those who are better off, assuming that the former have cumulated  greater disadvantages and face higher risks of experiencing negative events in both of the two life domains. 

WELLWAYS on the one hand enriches existing research by adopting a life course research perspective and using statistical modeling techniques to analyze complex survey data that track individuals' professional and family histories over time. On the other hand, it adds on knowledge on rising inequalities in health and well-being in Switzerland and France, with the aim of providing solid empirical evidence for policy recommendations turned towards improving the well-being of vulnerable groups in our societies.

Equipe de recherche : Stephanie Steinmetz (Unil), Camilia Gaiaschi (Unil)

Over the last yeaxs, women have made significant lll academia all progless and sclence across Europe. their representation across scientific fields and ranks remalns uneVen, as they ale still under-represented 1n some STEM disciplines (science technology engineering and mathematics) and 1n senlor positions. The WIRED project In Research and higher EDucation alms at investigating gender inequalities m academia by focusing on the reasons why and the mechanisms which women at through axe disadvantage ln the career progresslon and/or they drop-out from the academic labour market. It will undertake chal this lenge by means of an VO, comparative, level inter-disciplinary multimodel and multi- research. WIRED draws its from its of uruque datz,which are the result of the combination observational longitudinal micro-data on the Swiss and Itâlian academic populations with experimental data on gender ln the selection processes. The observational field will be based on different administrative and web-based data sources, including the mlcro data on academics held by the Italian Ministry of Education, University and Research and by the Swiss Federal Statistical where Office, the fieldwork will be undertaken. The experimental research ls based on a vrgnette survey which will be submitted to a sample of professors m targeted Italian and Swiss of Universities, chosen on the base the results of the first part of the research. The combination of two within these methods comparative approach will provide an extremely rich and comprehensi ve understanding of gender differences ln academic career to simultaneously shed light on the mlcro, meso and macro levels of the scarcity comparative and longitudinal insights, WIRED will represent a tremendous forward ln step forward in the debate on women in academia and science.