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This chapter describes patterns of life-course smoking behavior of seven cohorts of Swiss men and women who were born in the first 9 decades of the twentieth century. I briefly review the history of tobacco cultivation and consumption in Switzerland to provide context within which it is easier to understand patterns of consumption of different cohorts. Governments, farmers, and firms collaborated to promote tobacco through the middle of the twentieth century. Starting in the 1950s the Swiss government ended regulatory protection of tobacco and began to regulate the consumption and marketing of cigarettes. Social norms about the behavior of women and smokers also shifted. Rates of smoking among Swiss men has remained high across different cohorts, among women, the peak prevalence rate steadily increased from the oldest cohort to the cohort that was born in the 1950s. Among cohorts of women born after 1959, the peak smoking prevalence rate steadily declined. However, even in younger cohorts, smoking prevalence remains higher among men than among women.

Background: Overweight and obesity have been linked with several objective and subjective measures of health. However, results are mixed and this relationship seems to vary across populations, genders and age categories. This paper investigates the relationship between categories of the Body Mass Index (underweight, normal weight, overweight, obesity and severe obesity) and satisfaction with health.

Methods: Data come from eleven waves of the Swiss Household Panel (2004–2014). Analyses are based on 7151 men and 8142 women aged between 18 and 75. Satisfaction with health was measured on a ten-point scale. Pooled OLS, random and fixed effects were estimated.

Results: Overall, departures from the normal weight range seemed to decrease the individual satisfaction with health. Obesity and severe obesity appeared to have the strongest impact on satisfaction with health and this is particularly so in the case of women.

With the increase of unmarried cohabitation a growing body of research examines health differences between married and cohabiting people, but few studies investigate what happens when relationships end. While cohabitation offers some similar health advantages to marriage, typically cohabitants have been together less time, are less likely to have children or to have shared finances. Therefore separating from cohabitation may be less difficult than marriage. We compare Switzerland and Australia because the Swiss are more conservative in relationship formation and dissolution, where Swiss cohabitations are more serious and marriages more stable than in Australia. There are also important policy differences, where long-term cohabitants have the same legal entitlements as married couples in Australia, but not in Switzerland.

To examine country differences in the health consequences of separation for cohabitants and married people we use 16 waves of the Swiss Household Panel (SHP) and 14 Waves of the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia study (HILDA). Our sample includes respondents aged between 18 and 65 in cohabiting or marital relationships. Our dependent variables measure negative feelings, positive feelings and self-rated health. Using fixed effects regression models with lagged marital status measures we find that overall separation from marriage produces greater negative feelings and fewer positive feelings than separation from cohabitation, although differences vary by gender. Relationship dissolution had a stronger association with feelings compared to self-rated health. No clear country differences were found.

Although marriage and cohabitation appear to be increasingly equivalent across Western countries, extensive research has demonstrated that married and cohabiting individuals still differ in terms of attitudes and well-being. Married people tend to express higher life satisfaction and more traditional opinions and values, whereas cohabiters tend to report more depressive symptoms and a more egalitarian division of tasks. Little is known about the roots of these differences. This study focus on the Swiss Household Panel subsample of respondents who lived together before they married. Its aim is to understand whether degrees of traditionalism and happiness might exist prior to marriage or, alternatively, whether it is the transition to marriage that implies changes in happiness and traditional values. Results tend to demonstrate that individuals have a high probability of responding similarly before and after the transition to marriage and validate the former hypothesis. However, results also show that the variables that play a key role before the marriage do not necessarily play the same role after. That means that marriage contributes to changing the way people assess different domains of their life as well as the hierarchy of the importance of the sociodemographic characteristics that influence individuals‘ subjective well-being, and opinions or attitudes toward family.

Focusing on the last 14 waves of the Swiss Household Panel (2001–2014), we examined the impact of five family events (formation of the union, transition from cohabitation to marriage, birth of child/ren, dissolution of the union and departure of children from the family nest) on life satisfaction. Analyses were performed separately for women and men, and we controlled for demographics (age), economics (household income, education level, satisfaction with financial situation), health (impediment, satisfaction with health) and social interaction parameters (participation in clubs or other groups, satisfaction of free time, leisure activities and personal relationships). We adopted a life course perspective and used a multilevel approach to study individual trajectories on the mid-term (5 years) with an aim at understanding not only the impact of several events on well-being but at capturing its duration. Results show that most of the considered steps of the family construction and dissolution have an impact, which is different across time and between females and men.

The current evidence on immigrant health in Europe is mixed, with some studies indicating a healthy migrant effect, and others pointing out that immigrants experience worse health outcomes compared to natives. Very few studies however have investigated the potential existence of a migrant health paradox in Switzerland, a country with one of the highest shares of both foreign- and native-born immigrants in Europe, as well as a restrictive and increasingly negative immigration context. Research is also yet to assess the role played by legal status, particularly the acquisition of Swiss citizenship and the life course stage at which it occurs, in moderating the health gradient between natives and immigrants. In this chapter, we use data from the Swiss Household Panel (1999–2014) and a sample of 10,010 respondents between 18 and 60 years old at the time of entry into the panel, to perform multilevel logistic models of self-rated health. Results do not show a migrant health paradox. Migrants display worse health than natives, even after adjusting for differences in socio-economic status. Furthermore, legal status has a significant influence on the health disparities between Swiss natives and immigrants. Whereas immigrants that hold Swiss nationality since birth or those who were naturalized early in life are not significantly different in health compared to natives, immigrants who are not naturalized or were naturalised later in life display worse health than natives.

This chapter focuses on the relationship between individual health and its financial effects on the household in Switzerland in terms of its welfare, a topic which to date has been rarely explored scientifically. Based on data of the Swiss Household Panel, we ask to what extent the onset of member’s ill health affects his or her household’s welfare position, when this member’s function is that of a breadwinner. The results of the multivariate statistical analysis show that a deterioration in health not only affects individual modes of dealing with everyday activities but also the household’s complex structure of roles and positions. In this regard, there is a clear association between deterioration of the breadwinner’s psychological health troubles in sole-earner households and the risk of a decline in household welfare. The results also depict that demographic and resource-specific household factors (e.g. psychosocial strain) vary in relevance depending on the organization of the provider status amongst the household members.

In contemporary societies, attaining a decent standard of living which allows people to lead a socially integrated life is a key issue for human rights and social policy. In a context in which social structures are more porous yet still quite powerful, the risk of poverty is influenced both by the inertia of these structural determinants and by uncertain life events.

This contribution analyzes trajectories of material deprivation in Switzerland from 1999 to 2013 using data from the Swiss Household Panel. We describe the trajectories the households experienced and test the impact of various determinants of these trajectories. We challenge the robustness of previous results by developing innovative measures of the determinants by gathering information at the household level and by taking into account changes in the situation of the households over time. Our findings suggest that some of the claims that have been made regarding the individualization of social inequalities and the decline of social class are not confirmed empirically, and that the classical determinants of social inequalities remain powerful predictors. Sure enough, critical life events can have an impact; however, the scale of this impact is nowhere near as great as the effect of ‘classical’ poverty factors.

A growing proportion of the European population faces situations of vulnerability. Stable employees feel more and more at risk of losing their job or of experiencing a deterioration of their employment situation (Gallie et al. 1998). The share of standard employment relationships are declining, whereas atypical and precarious employment is on the rise (Hipp et al. 2015). In addition, joblessness in different forms—invalidity insurance, social assistance, early retirement—has also grown in recent decades (Paugam 2005). One of the unresolved issues is the relative scope of these phenomena. First, the advocates of what we could call exclusion thesis contend that only a small and marginal group is touched by material poverty and that this deprivation is inherently accompanied by isolation and segregation (Paugam 2005). A second approach, most famously brought forward by Robert Castel (2002), contends that not only the margins but also the larger zones of the labour market are characterised by precariousness. In a third perspective, it is asserted that work, even in formerly prestigious and well-paid occupations, is less and less socially recognised (Bourdieu 2003; Paugam 2000).

Past research on school-to-work transitions have largely neglected the time dependency of this transition process. In this study, we focus on the impact of the level of modernity and the labor market conditions at the time of labor market entry across school-leaver cohorts for the historical period from 1946 to 2002. In order to maintain a distinction between cohort and period effects, data from the life calendar collected in 2002, which is part of the Swiss Household Panel, along with administrative data were used. In addition, the study analyzes the effects of social background and attained educational qualification on the propensity to enter the labor market and the probability of cohorts being in the highest or lowest quartile of the status distribution in their first job. The empirical results support the suggested time dependence in entering the labor market: Younger cohorts achieve their credentials in periods characterized by a higher level of modernity; therefore, they are more likely to enter the labor market (as opposed to being unemployed or not being part of the labor market). However, the data also indicate significant differences across cohorts in their entry into the highest and lowest quartile of the status distribution.