Laura Napolitano

“Marriage Is More Than Being Together”: The Meaning of Marriage for Young Adults

Based on 424 qualitative interviews with a racially, ethnically, and socio-economically diverse population of young people ranging in age from 21 to 38, the authors ponder the paradox of the evolving role for contemporary marriage within the developmental perspective of the transition to adulthood. The authors identify two groups: marriage naturalists and marriage planners. Naturalists comprise one fifth of the sample, are largely from rural America, and follow the fast-track into marriage that defined the mid-twentieth century. Planners comprise the remainder of the sample, are based in metropolitan areas, and follow an elongated transition to adulthood. The authors examine the views of each group on commitment and the nature of relationships, and apply their findings to the debates about whether marriage is resilient, in decline, or becoming deinstitutionalized.

Educational Aspirations, Expectations, and Realities for Middle-Income Families

Although most Americans agree that postsecondary education is the clearest path to later financial security, many families have trouble saving money to help their children in this process. This article focuses on the struggles of middle-income families as they attempt to negotiate their daily financial realities with their aspirations for their children’s postsecondary education. In particular, the article examines the discord between the high educational aspirations these middle-income families have for their children and their daily financial constraints. We do so by analyzing in-depth interviews with 31 middle-income families living in the greater Philadelphia area. The middle-income parents in our sample are acutely aware of the importance of college for their children’s upward mobility, and they ideally would like to support their children in this pursuit. However, their current financial insecurity, their lack of government support, and the rising costs of college make preparing for this dream increasingly difficult.

The Long Shadow: Family Background, Disadvantaged Urban Youth, and the Transition to Adulthood

Baltimore entered the national spotlight in April 2015 with the death of Freddie Gray and the ensuing citywide protests. While The Long Shadow: Family Background, Disadvantaged Urban Youth, and the Transition to Adulthood does not deal specifically with issues of police brutality, its focus on the urban disadvantaged in Baltimore feels particularly important given these recent events. This book is the culmination of over two decades of research by some of sociology’s most respected scholars. Utilizing a life course developmental perspective, the authors examine the long-term outcomes of the Beginning School Study Youth Panel (BSSYP), a representative sample of Baltimore public school first-graders selected in the fall of 1982 and followed through 2006. A particular strength of the sample is the oversampling of poor whites. The existence and inclusion of poor and lower SES whites allows the researchers to examine racial differences within, and not simply across, socioeconomicstrata,a strategy that is often missing from studies of urban poverty. While the BSSYP study followed the children through high school, the authors fielded additional surveys after high school when the sample averaged age 22 (the Young Adult Survey, YAS) and 28 (the Mature Adult Survey, MAS). Sprinkled throughout the text are also short qualitative quotes used to illustrate some statistical points. The first chapter of the book introduces the reader to Baltimore, discusses the challenges facing the urban poor, and describes the study’s sampling and methods. The second chapter provides a relatively brief synopsis of Baltimore’s movement from ‘‘industrial boom’’ to ‘‘industrial bust.’’ While this narrative will be familiar to those with knowledge of the deindustrialization of Northeastern and Midwestern cities through the twentieth century, the authors do a particularly nice job of reminding readers that while these events might now seem to be in the distant past, they were crucial events in the life course of their sample’s parents. Chapters Three and Four focus on the early life of the BSSYP, paying specific attention to how family (Chapter 3) and neighborhood and school (Chapter 4) influence young people. Given that the research looks at these young people and their families in the early 1980s, much of what is discussed in these chapters should be familiar to readers. In Chapter Five, the authors move beyond the BSSYP and examine their sample’s transition into adulthood. The authors analyze four demographic markers: gaining employment, marrying (or partnering), moving out of the parental home, and becoming parents. They then identify the most common patterns of completion (or lack thereof) of these markers and the family background most often attached to these patterns. Those still reading this review carefully will notice educational completion is not included in the patterns discussed above. This is unique, as education has generally been treated as one of the ‘‘traditional’’ markers of the transition to adulthood by scholars. The authors argue that while the other transitions are clear-cut (that is, one clearly becomes a parent or does not), education does not have as finite an end and therefore is not included in these analyses. Instead, levels of education and employment (occupational status and earnings) are the socioeconomic destinations of the sample the authors focus on in Chapters Six through Eight. The authors find that baccalaureate completion by age 28 is particularly difficult for those from the lowest socioeconomic strata in the sample. There are also differences in employment by race and gender, a topic examined