What are today's opportunities and challenges of contemporary career transitions in Vocational and Professional Education and Training (VET/PET)? This was the central theme of the 8th International VE...

2024-04-24 | Input Talk | Carla Rowold Abstract Life courses become increasingly complex and determine inequalities in outcomes between groups. However, research often decomposes group gaps in life-course-sensitive outcomes based on a selective set of life course summary measures, such as the years spent in (full-time) employment. One example of group-specific outcomes is the Gender Pension Gap. In my dissertation I developed and applied two innovative combinations of methods: i) sequence analysis with the Kitagawa-Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition, as well as ii) the Life Course Feature Selection with the Ñopo decomposition. This talk guides through the practical application of both and presents the methodological and substantial contributions of both approaches that can be easily applied to other life-course-sensitive group inequalities. Presenter(s) Carla Rowold is a PhD candidate in Sociology at the University of Oxford and a postdoctoral researcher at the Max-Planck-Institute for Demographic Research. In her dissertation, she explores life-course- and gender-sensitive approaches to assess the link between gender inequalities over the life course and the Gender Pension Gap. Her research interests cover life course sociology and inequalities, particularly among genders, social demography, and work-family and retirement policies.

Comparative Population Studies welcomes submissions to the 2026 special issue Migration Trajectories Across the Life Course, guest edited by Sergi Vidal (Autonomous University of Barcelona), Aude Bernard (University of Queensland), and Riccardo Valente (Autonomous University of Barcelona). The proposed special issue aims to leverage a trajectory-based approach that fully accounts for the multi-dimensional nature of migration across time and space, providing deeper insights into diverse migration trajectory patterns and their long-term individual and societal implications.

Background In standard Sequence Analysis, similar trajectories are clustered together to create a typology of trajectories, which is then often used to evaluate the association between sequence patter...