Life Transitions and Life Satisfaction During Young Adulthood

This paper explores the legitimacy of patent law. It presents two detailed case studies to demonstrate how the European Patent Office’s practice Examination Guidelines transform contested inventive matter and methods into arguable patent claims. The analysis makes the broader conceptual point that patent law standards are shaped by a version of ‘textualisation’ free from normative or purposive meaning, relying instead on peculiar linguistic and rhetorical structures to cumulatively set up and entrench credible meanings for technolegal objects. The Guidelines are institutionally embedded, intermediary texts with ambiguous legal status, that drives legitimate expectations in the patent community. Using a social constructivist notion of legitimacy as endowment, textualisation explains the EPO’s ascendancy in the regulatory sphere; as well as the incongruent ways in which different constituents speak of the rules and aims of the patent system.


Introduction
Early adulthood is marked by a succession of major life events -completing school, leaving home, finding a job, finding a partner, starting a family. The interest here is in the effect of such events on feelings of personal well-being. Does the transition from school to work, for example, raise or lower personal happiness? What is the effect on well-being of forming a union? Of having a child? What is the overall course of subjective well-being (SWB) during young adulthood, and to what extent do these life transitions, taken as a whole, shape the well-being trajectory? These are the principal questions to which this paper is addressed. The data are from a Swedish panel study of young adults. We find, among other things, that subjective well-being follows a slight hill-shaped trajectory to about age 40, and that life transitions play a major role in shaping this trajectory. Among the transition events, changing family circumstances are especially important.
The analysis of well-being and its association with young adult transitions is at the intersection of demography, psychology, and economics. In demography, studies of transitions in the young adulthood years are generally situated in the context of life course analysis (Elder 1998;Elder et al. 2003;Shanahan 2000;Vogel 2002). Links to feelings of well-being, however, are rarely considered. The main transitions are leaving the parental household, completing education, labor force entry, partnership formation, and the birth of the first child (Billari 2001;Hogan and Aston 1986;Marini 1984). The effects on well-being of all of these transitions are examined here except for leaving the parental household, an event that typically occurs before the age span covered by the present data. In addition, we study the well-being effect of dissolution of partnerships, including partnerships both with and without children.
Studies of the life course of subjective well-being have been primarily done by economists and psychologists. Virtually all prior research focuses on the entire adult life span. The most widely-publicized finding in economic research, that of a U-shaped trajectory, implies that SWB trends downward to about age 50 and then recovers (Blanchflower and Oswald 2008;Dolan et al. 2008;Layard et al 2012). This finding, however, describes the course of SWB holding life circumstances constant. It assumes, among other things, that as one ages, no changes occur in employment, partnership, and parental status. In contrast, in the present analysis the interest is specifically in the effect on SWB of changes in such circumstances.
Studies that follow SWB over the life cycle, taking account of changing life circumstances, are quite scarce. The findings, which typically span an entire life cycle, suggest a mild increase or stability in SWB in early adulthood followed by a decline in later life (Charles et al. 2001;Costa et al. 1987;Easterlin 2006;Mroczek and Spiro 2005). None of this work, however, considers the extent to which the overall trajectory of SWB might reflect the various life transitions examined here.
A considerable amount of research has been done on the effects on well-being of specific life events. Partnership formation has typically been found to increase life satisfaction; dissolution to decrease it (Clark et al 2008;Lucas 2005;Musick and Bumpass 2012;Waite and Lehrer 2003;Waite et al 2009;Zimmerman and Easterlin 2006). Results on the effect of parenting on SWB have been somewhat mixed (Kohler et al. 2005;Hansen 2012;Herbst and Ifcher 2014;McLanahan and Adams 1987). The newest insights, obtained in longitudinal studies, indicate that an increase in life satisfaction takes place right before the birth of the first child, and persists though at a declining rate over the next two years (Baranowska and Matysiak 2011;Clark et al. 2008;Myrskyla and Margolis 2014). The effect on SWB of the school-to-work transition has been much less studied than the effects of partnerships and parenting. An Australian study finds that there is no change in SWB for those who enter the labor market and become fully employed (Creed et al. 2003 born, respectively, in 1968, 1972, and 1976, and interviewed in 1999, 2003, and 2009. Statistics Sweden was in charge of the fieldwork, collecting data via mail and web questionnaires. Survey respondents are linked to the Swedish Register to obtain complementary information on marital status, education, year of birth, and income. The panel database contains data on a total of about 3500 individuals. The present analysis is limited to the roughly 1400 persons who answered the questions of interest here in all three survey years. Descriptive statistics for the sample are given in Appendix Tables A-1 and A-2. For details on the data set and publications resulting therefrom, see <http://www.suda.su.se/yaps/Index.en.html>.
2.2_Variable description,--Life satisfaction is the measure of subjective well-being used as the dependent variable. It is the answer to the question: "Are you satisfied or dissatisfied with life in general right now?" Response categories are scaled from 1 to 5, with 1 meaning very dissatisfied and 5 very satisfied.
Other satisfaction variables included here relate to specific aspects of life, socalled "domain satisfaction" variables. The domains include satisfaction with economic situation, with "what you are currently doing", and also with various family relationships --partner, mother, and father. We relabel "satisfaction with what you are currently doing" as "satisfaction with work." For most respondents, "work" is a job, but for half or less of those ages 22 and 26 it refers to school. The questions on family relationships have somewhat fewer observations because those without a living mother, father, or partner did not answer the question. Satisfaction with children was not asked. The response scale for the domain satisfaction variables is 1 to 5, the same as that for life satisfaction.
The main independent variables are those identifying people as going through the school-to-work, first partnership union, parenting, and partnership dissolution transitions in each of the two periods under analysis, 1999-2003 and 2003-2009. Leaving the parental household is not included here because 93 percent of the respondents when first interviewed were no longer living with their parents.
A high proportion of young adults in Sweden briefly interrupt their education soon after high school to engage in either work or leisure activities before re-entering education at the post-secondary level (Cook and Furstenberg 2002). Those who interrupt their education are considered here to go through the school-to-work transition only after they re-enter education and graduate with their highest degree attained, that is, after they complete their highest level of education. Partnership formation is defined as transitioning from single person living alone to married or cohabiting during either of the two periods under analysis. The two partnership states, married and cohabiting, are combined here, because regression analysis indicated that they have similar positive effects on life satisfaction (cf. also Musick and Bumpass 2012). The parenting transition is considered to take place with the arrival of the first child (either biological or adopted) in a respondent's household. Finally, partnership dissolution occurs when a respondent reports being in a partnership (marriage or cohabitation) in 1999 or 2003, and being single or divorced/widowed in a subsequent survey.
Other variables in the analysis include work income (adjusted for inflation), occupation, and age of the respondent's children. The surveys were done between March and May of each year; hence the satisfaction levels reported in the survey are linked to the previous year's income. Occupational categories are constructed by combining two survey questions: main activity, defining the person's employment status; and main occupation, defining the person's production sector/occupation. Child's age is derived from the year of birth of each child reported by the respondent. We view the present analysis as a first step and combine both genders to obtain an overall picture. Clearly, future work should look at males and females separately. Appendix Table A Life satisfaction of individual i at age a may be expressed as: where is the association of life satisfaction with age, is an individual fixed effect, is a vector of covariates that change with age, and is an error term. The individual fixed effect term in (1) includes the effects on life satisfaction of personal characteristics that are time-invariant, such as personality and cohort. Applying a first difference to (1) yields: where ∆ = ( − −1 ). In equation (2), , representing all time invariant traits, is automatically subtracted from the equation. Previous studies have recognized the importance of controlling for cohort effects when studying SWB over the life cycle (Easterlin 2006, Blanchflower andOswald 2008). By using first differences, this paper goes a step further and eliminates not only the effect on life satisfaction of year of birth, but also the effects of other time invariant traits.
In equation (2), ∆ captures the association between the age interval a-1 to a and overall life satisfaction. Because ∆ is age-specific, different age intervals may have a different association with life satisfaction. To estimate the average path of life satisfaction during young adulthood, a regression is run with the change in individual life satisfaction as the dependent variable, and the four age interval dummies as independent variables. Tests for possible effects of time trends and time-varying cohort effects did not change the results reported here.
The regression is an OLS first-difference model without a constant, which is methodologically equivalent to an OLS first-difference regression that includes a constant but omits one of the age intervals from the estimation. Since no specific socioeconomic control variables are used, the coefficient on each age interval dummy represents the average experienced life satisfaction change of respondents over that interval. An econometric controversy about using OLS without a constant centers on diagnostic measures, such as 2 , which are not the main interest of this study (cf.

Eisenhaur 2003).
To estimate the effect of specific life transitions on young adults' life satisfaction, regression (2) is run including the transitions undergone by each individual as explanatory variables, i.e., where is a matrix of dummy variables with value 1 if person i has gone through transition T in the interval from a-1 to , and 0 otherwise. Matrix includes partnership formation, the school-to-work transition, parenting (with child below age 2 at time of interview), parenting (with child 2 years or older at time of interview), partnership dissolution (with a child), and partnership dissolution (without a child). Matrix T also includes a dummy variable for those not currently going through any transitions but who have completed their school-to-work, partnership, and parenting transitions. In this specification, the age interval coefficients capture the association between age and life satisfaction for the omitted category (those not going through any transition in an interval, and who have not completed the school-to-work, partnership, and parenting transitions) as well as the effects of age-varying factors common to all transition status groups. Since as it goes, suggests that attrition bias is not a major problem in the present study. 3.3 Effect on SWB of Each Transition.--Life transitions have a strong and statistically significant effect on subjective well-being. Indeed, taken together they predict the slight hill-shape of overall SWB, as will be shown in the following section.

Overall life satisfaction in
SWB tends to increase significantly when a union is formed and when a couple has a baby. SWB declines significantly when infants grow into young children and when a partnership is dissolved. The transition from school-to-work appears to have no significant effect on SWB. These are the principal findings from the multiple regression for all age intervals pooled reported in Table 4. Additional analysis indicated that the nil result for the school-to-work transition holds separately for manual and white collar workers, and also for less-educated compared with more-educated persons. In regressions for individual age intervals (not shown here) the results are essentially the same for those age intervals in which the specified transition typically occurs.
A sense of the "why" of some of the relationships between life satisfaction and the individual transitions is suggested by similar multiple regressions for satisfaction with each of the individual domains included in the survey. Not surprisingly, partnership formation is accompanied by a large positive increase in satisfaction with one's partner (Table 5, column 4, line 1). But it is noteworthy that there is also a significant positive impact on feelings about one's economic situation, housing, and parents (columns 1, 3, 5, 6). Satisfaction with work, however, is negatively associated with partnership formation.
A conjecture worth investigating is that work interferes with new conjugal relationships.
The increase in life satisfaction accompanying a new infant is presumably associated with a positive increase in satisfaction with one's children, although satisfaction with children was not asked in the survey. Interestingly, having an infant is associated with a significant decrease in satisfaction with one's mother (the infant's grandmother) (Table 5, column 5, line 3a).
As an infant grows older parenting is clearly accompanied by increasing financial and family strains. Parenting of those with children two or more years old is associated with a significant decrease in satisfaction with one's economic situation and with all of one's family relationships -not just mother, but also father, and, most notably, one's partner (Table 5, line 3b).
There is an interesting difference between partnerships with and without children in the domain changes associated with the break-up of a partnership. For those with a child, partnership dissolution is accompanied by decreased satisfaction with both work and one's economic situation (Table 5, line 4a). For those who are childless, dissolution is associated with decreased satisfaction with one's partner and one's economic situation (Table 5, line 4b).
As noted earlier, the school-to-work transition has no significant impact on life satisfaction. The domain results hint at why this may be so. Taking a job is accompanied by a significant improvement in feelings about one's economic situation, but also a significant decline in satisfaction with work (Table 5, line 2). Possibly schoolwork is less onerous than the demands of a steady job.

Discussion
Our principal findings are that in Sweden young adults' feelings of overall wellbeing typically increase slightly to about age 30, and then decline by almost the same amount in the following ten years. The increase is largely due to the positive and statistically significant impact on life satisfaction arising from partnership formation and birth of a first child. The subsequent decline reflects in large part the growing financial and family strains arising from parenthood, which significantly affect well-being.
Among parents with a child older than 2 years, satisfaction with one's economic situation, The finding here that satisfaction with one's mother declines significantly for those with a new infant may well be linked to the high labor force participation of older women.
New parents may expect the infant's grandmother(s) to share the burden of child care, and the limited ability of working grandmothers to help may be a disappointment.
These . That Swedish young adults in their thirties experience, on average, a slight decline in feelings of well-being, and that family relationships play an important part in this decline, suggests that even in Sweden successful reconciliation of work and family roles may still have some way to go.. There is need for much more study of the link between the work-family nexus and subjective well-being.    0.03 Absolute value of t-statistic in parentheses. + significant at 10%; * significant at 5%; ** significant at 1% a. The reference group for lines 1-5 is persons who during a given age interval are those in Table 3, line 1a. The age interval coefficient is the reference group's average change in life satisfaction in that interval and reflects factors common to all transition status groups in that interval. 02 Absolute value of t-statistic in parentheses. + significant at 10%; * significant at 5%; ** significant at 1% a. The reference group for lines 1-5 is persons who during a given age interval are those in Table 3, line 1a. The age interval coefficient is the reference group's average change in life satisfaction in that interval and reflects factors common to all transition status groups in that interval.   Marital status from Swedish register which classifies people as single, married, divorced or widowed, combined with self-reported information on cohabiting. Classification constructed from two questions asked in the YAPS survey: Occupation categories used in the paper are divided into following groups: 1 -What is your main occupation? What are your main tasks at work? 1) Student 2 -What is your current main activity? 2) Unemployed 3) Inactive (including military service, parental leave, housekeeping and those participating in an active labor market program such as adult learning) 4) Goods production 5) Service production 6) Assistant non-manual 7) Intermediate non-manual 8)Farmer/self-employed non-professional 9) Professional/higher manual/executive