How family networks of working mothers are changing in times of economic recession

Cinzia Castagnaro, Istituto Nazionale di Statistica (ISTAT)
Antonella Guarneri, Istituto Nazionale di Statistica (ISTAT)
Sabrina Prati, Istituto Nazionale di Statistica (ISTAT)

Work/family reconciliation is one of the most discussed matters in the national and international debate on welfare. In this study the attention is focused on the Italian case drawing the instrumental networks of working mothers with children aged 0-2, the group of women more in need of a support network. The general idea is to carry out an exploratory study in order to illustrate the different aspects characterizing the everyday life of working mothers in their usual tasks of family care. In times of economic recession it seems to be very interesting to study how changes the complex mosaic of childcare strategies of working mothers according to different characteristics of mothers and households. To accomplish this task, networks will be displayed focusing to two different year of reference (2011 and 2005), during the widespread economical crisis and in the pre-crisis period. Individual data were provided by the Istat Sample Survey on Births (2005 and 2011 edition). In our analysis we consider a sample of around 17,000 births enrolled in the Population Registers in 2003 (2005 edition – long form questionnaire) whereas in 2011 survey were interviewed 18 000 mothers of newborns enrolled at the Population Register during 2009-2010. Mothers were interviewed through C.A.T.I. (Computer Assisted Telephone Interview) technique; a little sub-sample consisting of 1600 foreign mothers in couple with foreigners were interviewed by P.A.P.I. technique (Paper And Pencil Interviewing). Focusing on ego-centered networks of mothers graphs are displayed and the main network measures are calculated In this application for each group of mothers we detected, first of all, the different kinds of instrumental support, given and received (type of relation), then the people involved for each relation (composition of the network) in order to display and try to measure the ‘instrumental networks’ of mothers (size of the network).