Trajectories of Children's Living Arrangements and Adolescent Outcomes
Open Access
- Author:
- Mitchell, Katherine Camilla Stamps
- Graduate Program:
- Sociology
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- June 18, 2009
- Committee Members:
- Valarie Elizabeth King, Dissertation Advisor/Co-Advisor
Valarie Elizabeth King, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Paul Richard Amato, Committee Member
Alan Booth, Committee Member
David Eggebeen, Committee Member - Keywords:
- family demography
child well-being - Abstract:
- While there has been much research on family structure and children’s associated well-being in the last several decades, most studies have employed a static measure of family structure that only measures children’s living arrangements at one point in time. Few studies have included measures of children’s family structure over time, and none have taken children’s entire family structure histories into account. This project documents the family living arrangements of a cohort of youth born between 1986 and 1992 from birth through adolescence using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. Factors that are predictive of experiencing various family structure trajectories and the associations between experiencing different trajectories and outcomes in adolescence are examined. In the sample of 1,870 children, 187 distinct family structure trajectories were identified. On average, children experienced about 1 family structure transition in childhood. However, the mean number of transitions varied greatly depending on family structure at birth, which was also predictive of other future family structure experiences. Latent class analysis yielded five distinguishable trajectories of children’s living arrangements over the course of childhood: continuously married biological parent families, long-term single mother families, married biological parents who break up, cohabiting biological parents who marry or break up, and a trajectory distinguished by the addition of a stepfather at some point during childhood. Mother’s education, mother’s family of origin characteristics, mother’s race, and mother’s experience of having a teen birth were predictive of the family structure trajectories their children experienced. The trajectories characterized by parental divorce and growing up with a long-term single mother were generally associated with lower levels of well-being in adolescence. Family instability, measured by the number of family structure transitions children experienced, was also associated with higher levels of depression and delinquency in adolescence independently of family structure trajectories. Other family structure variables, including the experience of various types of transitions as well as the percentage of childhood spent in certain family structures, were also predictive of later well-being. American children today have very diverse family structure experiences that predict later well-being in many different ways.