Three Essays Examining the Behavioral and Socioeconomic Transition to Adulthood in the United States and Africa: Evidence from Longitudinal Studies.

Abstract

This dissertation examines elements of adolescents’ socioeconomic and behavioral transition to adulthood. It consists of three separate studies, each relying on a different large-scale panel study that follows the same set of young people over time. Two of the studies examine adolescents in the contemporary United States while the other examines adolescents in contemporary urban South Africa. In the second chapter, I examine whether or not changes in the structure of U.S. social welfare policies in the mid-1990s, specifically those that incentivized and tied social support to participation in the paid labor force, had any effect on rates of U.S. long-term child poverty. I find that long-term poverty dropped substantially for black and white children of the post-reform cohort, with about 1 in 5 black children and 3.6 percent of white children classified as long-term poor, compared to pre-reform rates of 1 in 3 black children and 5.8 percent of white children. In the third chapter, I examine the link between contextual disadvantage and the likelihood that an adolescent’s relationship is “embedded” in common social contexts and peer groups. I find that adolescents form relationships with partners from various contexts and that neighborhood and school disadvantage help determine the social contexts from which adolescents know their partners. In the fourth chapter, I examine the link between paternal absence and sexual debut among adolescents in Cape Town, South Africa. I find that the absence of a father from a child’s household, net of other observed factors, increases the likelihood of adolescent sexual debut by age 16, although the effect differs by race and gender. In sum, the examination of race and gender differences inherent in each of these studies reminds social scientists that the social environment external to an individual interacts with the individual’s personal characteristics, implying that there is heterogeneity in the “effects” of the family and social context on individual outcomes and that understanding these heterogeneous effects among adolescents is required for moving toward a more holistic, life-course understanding of the racial and gender differences observed in adult outcomes.