The LIVES-FORS cohort survey: A longitudinal diversified sample of young adults who have grown up in Switzerland

Abstract

The LIVES-FORS Cohort Study (LCS) is a longitudinal annual survey following a cohort of young adults born between 1988 and 1997 who grew up in Switzerland (initial N = 1,691). The LCS was launched in 2013 and complements the Swiss Household Panel (SHP) by overrepresenting the second generation of immigrants ('secondos'). The principal aim of the study is to observe the transition into adulthood with a focus on the life course and on vulnerability processes, comparing participants whose parents arrived in Switzerland as adults to participants whose parents have grown up in Switzerland. The LCS provides rich data both on the factual (such as education, employment and financial situation) and on the self-judgement (wellbeing, personality and health, for example) dimensions of respondents' lives. The first wave of the LCS used a life-history calendar to collect information on each respondent's past life trajectory. In this first wave, several life trajectories were investigated (residence, cohabitation, couple's relationship, family, activities and health). This paper provides an overview of the LCS with a specific focus on the first four waves (the last data were released in December 2017).

Mixed Method Approaches for Data Collection in Hard-to-reach Populations

“…When such inferences are a research objective, other ingenious variants of network sampling can help bridge the type of aims described here with those of classic probability sampling. In the context of the LIVES program, for example, controlled network sampling allowed for the creation of a representative cohort sample with an oversample of the (statistically) hidden population of second-generation immigrants (Spini et al, 2019). In that study, network sampling generated further benefits: It allowed us to diminish attrition in subsequent waves in comparison with research participants recruited through classic random sampling (Brändle et al, 2017) and to exploit the tie structure used to generate the sample to describe different configurations of social capital in the reference population (Guarin, 2020).…”

How can we categorise ‘nationality’ and ‘second generation’ in surveys without (re)producing stigmatisation?

“…The LCS is an annual longitudinal survey following a cohort of young adults born between 1988 and 1997 who grew up in Switzerland (Spini et al, 2019). The main interest of this study is 'to describe the life paths to adulthood in Switzerland today and to compare young adults from the second generation to those whose parents have grown up in Switzerland (either born there or arriving as minors)' (Spini et al, 2019, p. 400).…”

“…As a longitudinal study, data are collected each year in connection to the Swiss Household Panel but with a different sampling method. While the participants of the Swiss Household Panel were drawn from official registers, those for the LCS were obtained, first, by sampling with an unequal selection probability in order to create a pool of contacts and, later, by network or snowball sampling (which concerned the majority of the sample, see Spini et al, 2019 or https://forscenter.ch). Thus, migrants' descendants were over-represented.…”

“…The first issue we faced when trying to define our sample based on the LCS was the low number of 'second-generation' respondents, which is striking if we consider that the LCS aims to reach a large number of migrants' descendants living in Switzerland. It was hypothesised that the networking among people with the same nationality would allow each young migrant descendant (during the recruitment phase by snowballing, see Spini et al, 2019) to connect the LCS interviewers with other young adults with the same nationality and lead to an increased sample. This idea was built on the assumption that the second generation will spend time more with others of the second generation from the same origin than those with Swiss-born parentage, probably based on Putnam's (2007) or similar theories that ethnic diversity decreases social capital.…”

“…with both parents who immigrated to Switzerland after the parents' eighteenth birthday; who were born in Switzerland between 1988 and 1997 and were thus between 16 and 25 years old at the beginning of the survey, and between 23 and 32 by 2020; or who had lived in Switzerland since 01 January 2013 and/or had attended school in Switzerland before the age of 10 (Spini et al, 2019).…”