The objective of the proposed research is to estimate the relationship between children's family background and their subsequent helping behavior as young adults. Three outcomes will be used as measures of young adults' helping behavior: charitable giving, volunteering, and the emphasis they place on helping behavior in parenting their own children. The specific aspects of family background to be examined are family income and structure (absence of a biological parent and remarriage of a custodial parent). The conceptual framework is based on developmental stages of prosocial moral reasoning (e.g., Eisenberg 1982) and the mechanisms by which family background can be expected to affect that development. Hence, the estimation of these effects will be stage-specific. Models of young adults' charitable giving and volunteering will be estimated using semi-parametric techniques which provide robust results against a wide range of assumptions about unobservable influences on the outcomes (see, e.g., Chay and Honore 1998). Models of young adults' emphasis on helping in the parenting of their own children will be estimated using ordered probit and Iogit as well as semi-parametric techniques. The data used to estimate the models will be drawn from the 1968-2001 waves of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) and two of its components: the 1997 Child Development Supplement (CDS) and the 2001 Center on Philanthropy Panel Study (COPPS). The results from this research will be important for several reasons. First, although there is laboratory evidence supporting various stage theories of prosocial development, there is no evidence concerning whether significant events during the lives of children have subsequent effects on their policy-relevant helping behavior as adults. Likewise, it is not known whether such events have ripple effects on the parenting of the next generation. Second, the literature that has examined family background effects on children's behavior has predominately focused on """"""""negative"""""""" behavior (Moore, Evans, Brooks-Gunn and Roth 1999). Positive behaviors, such as helping, have been only lightly researched. Finally, evidence indicating which stages of childhood are important for these domains of helping behaviors would suggest ages at which interventions promoting altruism should be targeted.
| Bandy, Robert; Ottoni-Wilhelm, Mark (2012) Family structure and income during the stages of childhood and subsequent prosocial behavior in young adulthood. J Adolesc 35:1023-34 |
| Wilhelm, Mark O; Brown, Eleanor; Rooney, Patrick M et al. (2008) The Intergenerational Transmission of Generosity. J Public Econ 92:2146-2156 |
