Do East and West German Life Courses Really Differ?
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Portineria del Dipartimento di Sociologia e Ricerca Sociale
Via Verdi, 26 I - 38122 Trento
tel. +39 0461 281300
portineria.sociologia [at] unitn.it
At 11.00
Place: Department of Sociology and Social Research, Via Verdi 26 Trento, Meeting room – II floor,
Speaker:
- Tim F. Liao, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (USA)
Abstract
People’s life courses can be shaped by the social history, social structure, and welfare system of a country. The social history of Germany with its unification in 1990 provides a prime example for assessing life course differences between people who were born and grew up in the eastern and western parts of the country. Do East and West German men and women’s life courses really differ? How do we know they are different enough? To date there is no proper method for testing differences between sets of sequences equivalent to differences between sample means. This presentation discusses a new method for properly assessing life course differences by innovatively adapting and applying the Bayesian Information Criterion (BIC), a popular method for model selection in sociology and demographic research, and the Likelihood Ratio Test (LRT).
