Family Structure and the Risk of a Premarital Birth

TLDR

The authors test three hypotheses on how a woman’s family characteristics between birth and age 19 influence her risk of a premarital birth. They construct dynamic measures of family structure using parent‑history data from the U.S. National Survey of Families and Households to assess the relative importance of childhood family events, structural changes, and time spent in modal family types. The dynamic measures capture distinct theoretical and empirical dimensions of family experience, enabling effective testing of socialization, social control, and instability‑change hypotheses.

Abstract

The authors examine three hypotheses regarding the impact of a womans family characteristics between birth and age 19 on her chances of having a premarital birth. construct dynamic measures of family structure using parent-history data from the [U.S.] National Survey of Families and Households. We use these data to examine the relative importance of family events during childhood changes in family structure during childhood and adolescence and durations spent in the modal family structures experienced by respondents while growing up. Our results suggest that these dynamic measures capture both theoretically and empirically distinct dimensions of family experience and that distinguishing between these dimensions provides sufficient analytical leverage to test the socialization social control and instability and change hypotheses. (EXCERPT)