At the end of 2022, the LIVES Centre launched a call to its members to collect "seed money" grants. These applications aim to obtain funds from another donor for the preparation of new research projects on life course and vulnerability.
In early 2023, the Centre's management board awarded funding of CHF 20,000 each to the following two projects:
Evaluation of the feasibility of setting up a Swiss time-use survey in the social sciences
Researchers: Caroline Roberts (LIVES, SSP, UNIL) and Oliver Lipps (FORS, SSP, UNIL)
Time use surveys are designed to measure the time people spend on different types of activities over a given period of time, such as paid work, caring for oneself or relatives, housework, shopping, sleeping, volunteer work, social life and leisure, eating, travelling and using media and technology. However, to date, Switzerland has no nationally representative survey on this topic. This project aims to assess the overall demand among Swiss researchers studying life course and vulnerability for detailed time use data in Switzerland; and to investigate the feasibility of collecting detailed time use data using a smartphone application.
Indebtedness and gender inequalities over the course in Switzerland
Researchers: Solène Morvant-Roux (IDESO, UNIGE) and Michel Oris (LIVES, CIGEV, UNIGE)
In the context of financialized capitalism debt appears central in the accumulation of (dis)advantages. Actually some debts allow wealth accumulation versus impoverishment processes. Previous research highlights that while the ‘wealthy’ hold most of the household debt, notably mortgages, the ‘poor’ record most defaults. But beyond the socioeconomic factors underlying unequal distribution of different debts there are also specific inequalities that affect women throughout the debt process within the households and across households categories The aim is to build a collaborative interdisciplinary research project between sociologists demographers and economists that will look at intra- and inter households gender inequalities around debt and their consequences on socioeconomic inequalities.
Congratulations to these two research teams! We wish both of them every success with their project.
The LIVES Centre offers three types of grants to support innovation in life course research: the "Seed money", the "Young scholar grant" and the "Visitor grant". These funds are addressed to the members of the LIVES Centre as well as to the extended network of researchers studying the life course and vulnerability.