Objective: The proposed research aims to build knowledge about family determinants of children's social and economic well being as children come into their own and make the transition to adulthood. Specific hypotheses address familial influences on educational attainment, family determinants of union- and family-formation choices of young adults, and how the quality of early family relationships shapes adult child-parent relationships. Methods: The investigators address these questions in the context of an adoption design which offers an opportunity to carry out especially powerful tests of socialization and social-psychological theories. The adoption design is 'powerful' because it allows them to test family determinants of children's outcomes independently of genetic influences. They capitalize on the resources of the Colorado Adoption Project (CAP), a long-term, longitudinal adoption study of 245 adoptive families and 245 nonadoptive families. The CAP children, their siblings, and their home environments have been assessed repeatedly since infancy using a broad, multivariate battery of social, environmental, and behavioral measures. The investigators propose to interview the probands and their siblings as they reach adulthood. Significance: The proposed research is innovative, both in the fields of behavioral genetics and in social demography, in that it brings behavioral genetic methods to bear 1) on sociological and social-demographic phenomena and 2) on the study of life-course developmental process. The marriage of behavioral genetics and social demography promises to advance understanding of how family factors influence children's life chances and to enrich socializ-ation models of life-course development.
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