Dennis P. Hogan

The Impact of Social Status, Family Structure, and Neighborhood on the Fertility of Black Adolescents'

Black teenagers living in metropolitan areas of the United States initiate sexual intercourse at earlier ages than other teenagers and have higher rates of premarital pregnancy. Ethnographic studies of black families have claimed that economic uncertainties cause young blacks to delay marriage, while many young women achieve adulthood through premarital parenthood. It is also probable that girls who grow up in a female-headed family or who see their sisters become teenage parents are more likely to accept single-parenthood as a way to achieve adult status. These studies have suggested that ghetto neighborhoods are characterized by loosely defined and enforced norms of sexual behavior and age and sex compositions conducive to juvenile deviance. These features of ghetto life make it difficult for parents to regulate successfully their childrens behaviors. As a consequence, residents of ghetto neighborhoods are expected to initiate sexual intercourse at earlier ages and to have higher rates of accidental premarital pregnancy than other teens. These hypotheses have received limited support in previous demographic research on teenage fertility. In this paper, these ethnographic explanations of the fertility behaviors of black adolescents are tested, using data from a random sample of more than 1,000 black females aged 13-19 who lived in the city of Chicago in 1979. This analysis improves on previous demographic research by both measuring the total effects of these varibles on fertility and decomposing them into components due to effects on rates of initial sexual intercourse and the probability of conception among the sexually active. A nonbiasing, continuous-time semi-Markov model is used to identify the net effects of these factors on rates of initial sexual intercourse and pregnancy.

The structure of intergenerational exchanges in American families.

Intergenerational support is analyzed using data from the National Survey of Families and Households. The authors find evidence that a systematic latent structure of intergenerational exchange characterizes the giving and receiving of support. Overall, one-half of Americans do not routinely engage in giving or receiving relationships with their parents and only about one in 10 are engaged in extensive exchange relationships. Parents are assisted more often in situations of poor health, and more often receive assistance when they have young children. Assistance in time of need is not uniform and is rarely extensive. Intergenerational assistance is constrained by family structure and the needs and resources of each generation. African-Americans are consistently less likely than whites to be involved in intergenerational assistance. In each generation, men receive as much altruistic support as women; higher levels of giving and receiving of aid among American women are due to their greater involvement in exchange.

The Variable Order of Events in the Life Course.

The temporal order in which a man finishes school, starts working, and first marries is an important characteristic of his life course. Ordering patterns are distributed on a scale of the degree of conformity with the normative ordering of events. Major determinants of ordering patterns are identified. While family background is of limited importance for the ordering of events in the life cycle, the manner in which a man spends the years of late adolescence and early adulthood is of critical relevance. College attendance delays marriage, but not by a sufficient amount of time to prevent substantial numbers of men from marrying prior to completing their schooling. Military service is a major disruptive factor in the life courses of men, although the effects of service in the peacetime army have been less deleterious since men have some discretion in its timing. The unique histories of birth cohorts that result from the age-specific conjunction of period events is a crucial exogenous factor in the life course of men. Men for whom the ordering of events is deviant experience higher rates of marital disruption than do other men. This supports the hypothesis that the variable ordering of events in the life course is a contingency of some importance in the life cycle.

Giving between generations in American families.

This paper documents the types and amounts of aid exchanged between adults and their non-coresidential parents. Data for the study are drawn from a representative national sample survey of Americans age 19 and older conducted in 1987–1988. Exchanges of monetary and material resources, childcare, household assistance, and companionship and advice are considered.Patterns of intergenerational exchange are found to differ by gender, family structure, age, ethnicity, and socioeconomic situation. Differences in exchange between males and females and between whites and Mexican-Americans are related to other life-course characteristics, and to the availability and proximity of kin. Blacks and persons living in poverty are shown to be less involved than other groups in intergenerational exchanges. Finally, patterns of prior assistance and the available needs and resources of the respondents and their parents are found to influence current patterns of exchange.

The Transition to Adulthood as a Career Contingency.

Individuals in American society tend to agree that it is normatively appropriate behavior to order the events marking the transition to adulthood so that formal schooling is completed first, and so that both school completion and beginning of first job occur prior to marriage. This paper reports on the testing of the hypothesis that men who order their transition events in a nonnormative fashion experience reduced occupational status and earnings returns in their later careers. The study is based on the responses of 18,370 ever-married white males aged 20 to 65, who were employed in the experienced civilian labor force, and were interviewed in the 1973 Occupational Changes in a Generation II survey. While no difference in occupational attainments are observed, men who experience a disorderly transition to adulthood also experience lower earnings returns to their education, as well as substantial deficits in their total earnings.

Improved disability population estimates of functional limitation among American children aged 5-17.

Objectives: This paper (a) creates and validates measures for population survey data to assess functional limitation in mobility, self-care, communication, and learning ability for school-age American children; (b) calculates rates of functional limitation using these measures, and provides population estimates of the number of children with limitations; and (c) examines these limitations as a function of socioeconomic factors. Method: The study is based on data for children aged 5–17 collected in the 1994 National Health Interview Survey on Disability. Ordinal values are assigned to survey items in the four functional areas and analyzed to produce scales of high reliability. These measures are used to identify within a 95% confidence interval the number of children with these limitations. Ordered logistic regression models measure the effects of functional limitations on disability and societal limitation. Socioeconomic differences are measured with an ordered logistic regression model that predicts severity and comorbidity. Results: Limitations in learning ability (10.6%) and communication (5.5%) are the most common, with mobility (1.3%) and self-care (0.9%) occurring less often. Six percent of children have one serious functional limitation and 2.0% have two or more serious functional limitations. This corresponds to 4.0 million school-age American children with serious functional limitations. Functional limitation is strongly linked to socioeconomic disadvantage and to residence in single-mother households. Conclusions: Future population research should use multiple-item scales for four distinct areas of functional limitation, and a summary that takes into account both severity and comorbidity. The improved estimates of the number of school-age children with functional limitation in this paper may help contribute to a more informed scientific and policy discussion of functional limitation and disability among American school-age children. Future research on the disability process among children must consider the role of socioeconomic disadvantage and family structure.

The demography of minority aging populations.

ABSTRACT: Studies of aging and the life course have often documented great diversity in family structure and living arrangements among the elderly. This article examines historical and demographic trends in the ethnic and racial composition of older cohorts in the United States and their impact on family structure; identifies the demographic causes of these changes and projects future trends in the relative size and proportion of different racial and ethnic populations; and discusses the important policy implications of such compositional shifts for social policy and for the welfare of the minority elderly in the next century.

THE EFFECTS OF DEMOGRAPHIC FACTORS, FAMILY BACKGROUND, AND EARLY JOB ACHIEVEMENT ON AGE AT MARRIAGE

National data for ever-married men aged 20 to 65 in March 1973 are utilized to estimate least squares and log-linear structural equation models of age at marriage. We demonstrate that most characteristics of family background (including both the family structure and its socioeconomic standing) are irrelevant in their effect on age at marriage. Intercohort trends are not explicable with reference to the changing socioeconomic, ethnic, or nativity compositions of the cohorts. Regional differences in age at marriage have persisted over the years in only slightly diminished form and cannot be explained by reference to the nativity, ethnic, or socioeconomic compositions of the regions. Early job status relates only weakly to age at marriage. Only those activities that are time-consuming or otherwise disruptive of the smooth operation of normal life-cycle processes during the transition from adolescence to adulthood (such as college attendance and service in the military) seriously affect the age at which a man marries.

Marriage in an Institutionalized Life Course: First Marriage among American Men in the Twentieth Century.

Life-course researchers have linked variations in age at first marriage to such period conditions as educational and employment opportunities and military service requirements and to intercohort variability in the availability of potential spouses. Little empirical evidence supports this claim. Also it remains unspecified whether period and cohort factors directly influence the probability of marriage or do so through their effects on individuals school work and military experiences. Using individual-level data for native white [U.S.] men born between 1907 and 1953 matched with statistics on period conditions and cohort characteristics we show that these macro-level factors have significant effects on the rate of first marriage. While a substantial portion of their impact is mediated through individuals life-course experiences there are persistent effects of institutional arrangements on timing of first marriage. (EXCERPT)

The impact of class, education, and health care on infant mortality in a developing society: the case of rural Thailand.

Demographic and social factors affecting infant mortality in rural northern Thailand are examined using log-linear modifiedmultiple regression models and data drawn from a representative sample of married couples in Chiang Mai and Chiang Rai provinces. Demographic factors do not account for the effects of variations in parental ability or willingness to provide adequate infant care. The final model estimated incorporated both these social dimensions of child care. Parental ability, measured by father’s social class, mother’s health information, and local community development levels, continued to have significant independent effects upon infant survival. Parental willingness, measured by parent’s beliefs about intergenerational wealth transfers, no longer had a significant effect net of other social variables, but infant survival was still affected by whether both parents wanted a birth.