This is a proposal to continue and extend the study of important family and household decisions made by children during their transition to adulthood. Its primary focus centers on two broad interrelated areas of family life--the process of leaving the parental home, and the formation of marital and cohabiting unions. The research will investigate how children's family and household decisions are affected by many aspects of the parental family and by their own experiences, attitudes, and plans. Data from a panel study of mothers and children will be used to examine the following aspects of these two components of the transition to adulthood: (a) the influence of the parental family on young adult familial decisions and experiences; (b) how young adult familial and household experiences are interrelated; (c) how teenage familial attitudes and plans are implemented and modified; (d) how familial decisions interrelate with educational and occupational aspirations and achievements; (e) the influence of teenage behavior on parental behavior and attitudes; and (f) the effect of interchanges across three generations on young adult decisions. Such research is timely, because major changes in familial behavior and attitudes have accelerated in recent decades, and because the family decisions of young people have important implications for subsequent behavior and well being. Studies of leaving the parental home, marriage and cohabitation should provide information relevant for understanding the mental and physical well-being of young adults and their children. The data come from a longitudinal study of young adults and their mothers. The mothers, each of whom had borne a child in 1961, were interviewed 7 times from 1962 to 1985. The child born in 1961 was included in the study in both 1980 (at age 18) and 1985 (at age 23)- Response rates have been unusually high. We have a full set of interviews across all waves of the study from mothers and children in 82% of the families originally included in 1962. The 1985 survey used a life history calendar to obtain from the young adults monthly retrospective data over the past 9 years about their living arrangements, cohabitation, marriage, childbearing, schooling, and work, plus data on annual financial exchanges between them and their parents. Studies of the determinants of residential transitions and entrance into marital and cohabiting unions will use continuous and discrete time event history or hazard models. The consequences of residential and union formation experiences will be studied using models of individual change over time estimated by regression and LISREL.
| Axinn, W G; Clarkberg, M E; Thornton, A (1994) Family influences on family size preferences. Demography 31:65-79 |
| Axinn, W G; Thornton, A (1992) The relationship between cohabitation and divorce: selectivity or causal influence? Demography 29:357-74 |
| Thornton, A (1988) Cohabitation and marriage in the 1980s. Demography 25:497-508 |
