Race‐Ethnicity,Union Status,and Change in Body Mass Index in Young Adulthood

This study used data from three waves of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health and fixed effects regression to consider whether associations between change in union status and change in body mass index (BMI) were moderated by race‐ethnicity. The results indicated that intimate unions were differentially associated with gains in BMI along racial‐ethnic lines, especially for women. When compared with White women, marriage was associated with larger increases in BMI for Black, Hispanic, and Multiracial women, and cohabitation was associated with larger increases for Black and Hispanic women. In contrast, marriage and cohabitation were associated with less weight gain for Asian when compared with White women. Among men, racial‐ethnic differences in the relationship between union status and BMI were similarly patterned but less pronounced. The results suggest that marital status further exacerbates racial‐ethnic disparities in BMI from adolescence to young adulthood.     

The Effects of the Differential Undercount on Survey Estimates of Race Differences in Marriage

The fact that Blacks, and especially Black men, are not as well represented in survey data as Whites is well known among demographers. What is less well known is the potential impact of the differential undercount on estimates of race differences in various demographic behaviors. This research examines the potential effects of the differential undercount by race and marital status on estimates of race differences in marriage. The results show that the differential undercount has a surprisingly small effect on population distributions and on life‐table estimates of race differences in marriage formation. The author concludes that underrepresentation of unmarried Black men in survey data cannot explain why the race gap in marriage is smaller among men than among women.     

The Role of Social Support in the Transition From Foster Care to Emerging Adulthood

Many youth leave foster care with disrupted relationships with their family and others in their social networks. Previous research has documented the severe adversity that former foster youth face in the transition to young adulthood. Perhaps some difficulties are at least partially related to a lack of social support that results from frayed relationships. This article reviews the literature on social support, particularly as it relates to foster youth, for the purpose of examining the role that formal and informal supports play in the transition to adulthood. The implications of this literature for successful transitions for former foster youth are discussed, as well as ways child welfare workers can engage youth and their families, and help them develop supportive social networks.     

Race/Ethnic Differences in the Marital Expectations of Adolescents: The Role of Romantic Relationships

I use a sample of 12,973 adolescents in the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health) to examine race/ethnic differences in perception of the likelihood of marriage in adulthood and the role of heterosexual romantic relationship experience in explaining this difference. Compared to adolescents from other race/ethnic backgrounds, White adolescents are more likely to date and are especially more likely than Black adolescents to participate in serious romantic relationships that increase marital expectations. Although the type of current or recent relationship is associated with marital expectations, they do not explain the observed race/ethnic gap in these expectations. Overall, the results suggest that these adolescent romantic experiences likely play only a small role in determining differential marital expectations.     

“I'll Give You the World”: Socioeconomic Differences in Parental Support of Adult Children

Research has shown that parents with higher socioeconomic status provide more resources to their children during childhood and adolescence. The authors asked whether similar effects associated with parental socioeconomic position are extended to adult children. Middle‐aged parents (N = 633) from the Family Exchanges Study reported support they provided to their grown children and coresidence with grown children (N = 1,384). Parents with higher income provided more emotional and material support to the average children. Grown children of parents with less education were more likely to coreside with them. Parental resources (e.g., being married) and demands (e.g., family size) explained these patterns. Of interest is that lower income parents provided more total support to all children (except total financial support). Lower income families may experience a double jeopardy; each grown child receives less support on average, but parents exert greater efforts providing more total support to all their children.     

Compensatory Weight Control Behaviors of Women in Emerging Adulthood: Associations Between Childhood Abuse Experiences and Adult Relationship Avoidance

Abstract

Objective: To examine correlates of compensatory weight control behaviors among women in transition between adolescence and adulthood. Participants: The authors recruited a sample of undergraduate women (N = 759) at a large northwestern university during the 2009–2010 academic year. Methods: Logistic regression was used to assess relations among childhood abuse, psychosocial functioning, adult dating relationship factors, and women's endorsement of compensatory weight control behaviors. Results: The final model reliably distinguished between participants who endorsed versus denied use of compensatory behaviors (χ²[5, N = 747] = 36.37, p < .001), with global psychosocial functioning and relationship avoidance accounting for the most variance. Conclusions: These findings illustrate the importance of considering childhood abuse histories and adult relationships while assessing young women's compensatory weight control behaviors.     

Style and Language Use among Youth of the New Immigration: Formations of Race,Ethnicity, Gender,and Class in Everyday Practice

In this article I consider “style” as a linguistic and cultural concept that can demonstrate how identities performed through language use are linked to topics of central concern in studies of immigrant youth, including racial and ethnic formation, generational cohorts, acculturation, assimilation, and gender. I draw on anthropological and sociolinguistic approaches to style not generally considered in migration studies and present ethnographic data of two cliques of Desi (South Asian American) teens in a Northern California high school. I argue that analyses of youth style can substantially complicate assimilation frameworks by highlighting the ways in which young peoples' linguistic practices may not fit neatly into commonly used analytical categories of “immigrant” and “American.” Focusing on how political economy and local histories inform power and difference that shape migration experiences for youth, the article moves beyond routinely examined areas of heritage language retention and loss to analyze the significance of youth performances of heritage languages as well as English.     

Safety Nets and Scaffolds: Parental Support in the Transition to Adulthood

Using longitudinal data from the Youth Development Study (analytic sample N = 712), we investigate how age, adult role acquisition and attainments, family resources, parent-child relationship quality, school attendance, and life events influence support received from parents in young adulthood. Parental assistance was found to be less forthcoming for those who had made greater progress on the road to adulthood, signified by socioeconomic attainment and union formation. The quality of mother-child and father-child relationships affected parental support in different ways, positively for mothers, negatively for fathers. School enrollment, negative life events, and employment problems were associated with a greater likelihood of receiving support. The findings suggest that parents act as "scaffolding" and "safety nets" to aid their children's successful transition to adulthood.     

Race,Ethnicity, and Deviance: A Study of Asian and Non-Asian Adolescents in America

This study shows that Asian American adolescents commit less deviance in the form of school misbehavior than white, black, Hispanic, or Native American adolescents. Social control and social learning theories receive support as the observed differences are explained primarily by race/ethnic differences in family backgrounds and school bonding. These variables' explanatory ability tends to be invariant across four regional groups of Asian Americans. This study applies OLS regression to self-reported data from a nationally representative sample.     

The Age of Independence,Revisited: Parents and Interracial Union Formation Across the Life Course

Romantic relationships that cross racial lines have grown since anti‐miscegenation laws were deemed unconstitutional. In The Age of Independence, Rosenfeld argued that parental influence over children's mate selection processes had waned. Rosenfeld, however, was not able to test this supposition directly because of his reliance on cross‐sectional census data. Using Waves I and III of Add Health for a cohort of individuals from 1994 to 2002, we examine whether parents matter in shaping their offspring's romantic attachments, by exploring whether adolescent reports of maternal closeness and parental control are associated with youth's likelihood of being in an interracial relationship in emerging adulthood. We find that parental factors do influence emerging adults’ romantic relationships; these associations vary by race, ethnicity, and gender. Among white men, maternal closeness in adolescence reduces the likelihood of being in an interracial relationship in emerging adulthood. Parental control elevates the odds of being in an interracial relationship among black and Hispanic women. We also find that parental decisions on where families live shape offspring's choices, as relative exogamous group size in adolescence is associated with interracial union formation in later life. Our findings suggest that parental influence remains salient in the partner choices made by emerging adults.     

Nonstandard Work and Marital Instability: Evidence From the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth

This article replicated and extended Harriet Presser's (2000) investigation of the linkages between nonstandard work and marital instability. We reexplored this question using data from a sample of 2,893 newlywed couples from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY) and using different analytic techniques. In contrast to Presser, we found that the key dimension of husbands' and wives' employment was nonemployment. Similar to Presser, we found that wives' working of fixed night shifts increased the risk of divorce, driven by the experience in marriages over 5 years in duration. However, we did not replicate Presser's finding that the effect is significant only among households with children; rather, wives' fixed night shifts were associated with divorce only among those without children.     

Hispanic Immigration and Black Violence at the Macro‐Level: Examining the Conditioning Effect of Victim Race/Ethnicity

Much attention has been devoted to the relationship between Hispanic immigration and violent offending at the macro‐level, including how it varies across racial and ethnic groups. Unfortunately, little attention has been paid to the conditioning effect of the race/ethnicity of the victim, or how Hispanic immigration is associated with crime by one racial/ethnic group against members of the same or different groups. Using National Incident‐Based Reporting System offending estimates and American Community Survey data, we examine the association between Hispanic immigration and black intra‐ and intergroup (black‐on‐white and black‐on‐Hispanic) homicide, robbery, and serious index violence in over 350 U.S. communities. We employ advanced imputation methods to address missing data that have constrained much prior research, as well as utilize crime measures adjusted for the likelihood of random contact between groups. Findings suggest that (1) Hispanic immigration has a positive association with black violence on the whole, but that (2) this association is conditioned by the race/ethnicity of the victim. Our results reinforce the importance of distinguishing across offender–victim dyads in research on the immigration–crime nexus, particularly in light of competing theoretical expectations. Directions for future research and policy are discussed.     

The Reproductive Context of Cohabitation in the United States: Recent Change and Variation in Contraceptive Use

Drawing on data from 2 waves of the National Survey of Family Growth (N = 11,065), the current research addressed 2 overarching questions about the reproductive context of cohabitation in the United States. First, did patterns of contraceptive use among cohabitors change during the last 2 decades of the 20th century? Second, did patterns of contraceptive use among cohabiting women tend to vary by education or race/ethnicity? Results point to a growing resemblance between never‐married cohabiting women and those in first marriages in the likelihood of using a “very effective” contraceptive method and suggest that cohabitation is most “marriage like” with respect to reproductive behavior among the least educated.     

Residential Segregation on the Island: The Role of Race and Class in Puerto Rican Neighborhoods

In this paper, we use racial data from Census 2000, available for the first time in 50 years, to examine the links among race, socioeconomic status, and residential location on the island of Puerto Rico. Puerto Ricans overwhelmingly chose white as their race, and they chose only one race, not a combination of races that would seem more in keeping with the ideology of mestizaje. Overall, segregation by race is modest compared with residential segregation in the United States. In keeping with the Puerto Rican claim that class is more important than race, we find that segregation by race is generally lower than segregation between the lowest and highest income categories in all metro areas, but that the results for education and occupational status differ by metropolitan area. In San Juan-Bayamón, the most diverse metropolitan area on the island, we find that as percent black increases, neighborhood socioeconomic status decreases, though the changes are not that stark, except in Loiza, a community of black Puerto Ricans and in some Dominican neighborhoods, though there are relatively few of these neighborhoods.     

The Sociology of Adolescence and Youth in the 1990s: A Critical Commentary

The 1990s saw considerable advances in the state of research on adolescence and youth. This article provides a critical commentary on a subset of this research, focusing on the causes and consequences of the lengthened period in which the transition to adulthood occurs. It provides a brief history of adolescence research, identifying a select set of topics, themes, and research problems that will guide research on adolescence and youth over the next decade. These research foci, which include peer group relations, biological influences on adolescence, employment experiences, increased autonomy, and racial and gender differences, are described as representing either continuities or advances in adolescence research. The strengths and shortcomings of this research are detailed. The paper concludes by suggesting promising areas for future research and by providing guidelines for undertaking such research.     

Race,threat and workplace sexual harassment: The dynamics of harassment in the United States, 1997–2016

Sexual harassment is a persistent problem for women in the workplace. Prior research has explored the effects of sexual harassment on the psychological, physical and economic wellbeing of the victims. Despite the extensive research exploring the causes, most studies focus on micro‐level factors, and few studies examine the role of macro‐level factors on sexual harassment in the workplace. Using public Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) data and a separate dataset of individual level workplace sexual harassment complaints, we test two hypotheses about sexual harassment in American workplaces. First, we show that the decline in workplace sexual harassment complaints has been uneven, with African‐American women experiencing an increased relative risk of sexual harassment in the workplace, even as overall reported harassment complaints are down. Second, we show that economic threat — operationalized in this case through unemployment rates — drives increases in sexual harassment of women in American workplaces. While the data on harassment complaints is limited, data strongly suggests that the changes are driven by shifts in underlying levels of harassment, rather than changes in the likelihood of reporting harassment.     

The Diffusion of Tolerance: Birth Cohort Changes in the Effects of Education and Income on Political Tolerance

Political tolerance—the willingness to extend civil liberties to traditionally stigmatized groups—is pivotal to the functioning of democracy and the well‐being of members of stigmatized groups. Although political tolerance has traditionally been more common among American elites, we argue that as tolerance has increased, it has also diffused to less educated and less affluent segments of the population. The relative stability of political attitudes over the life course and the socialization of more recent birth cohorts in contexts of increased tolerance suggest that this diffusion of tolerance occurs across birth cohorts rather than time periods. Using age‐period‐cohort models and more than three and a half decades of repeated cross‐sectional survey data, we find persistent and robust across‐cohort declines in the importance of both income and higher education in determining levels of political tolerance. Declines in the effects of socioeconomic status are evident with tolerance toward all five out‐groups in the analysis—anti‐religionists, gays and lesbians, communists, militarists, and racists—but to varying degrees. These findings fit with a model of changes in public opinion, particularly views of civil and political rights, through processes of cultural diffusion and cohort replacement.