Early Living Together, Marriage and Parenting Benefits some Young Adults

Young people are always encouraged to complete their education and postpone marriage and children to achieve more rewarding lifestyles. However, a Penn State study found that for some young adults, getting married or living together and having children have provided positive benefits.

"In industrial countries, young people age 18 to 25 are expected to explore their identity, work and love by delaying marriage and parenthood," says lead author Alan Booth, distinguished professor of sociology, human development and demography. "It is believed that those individuals who fail to postpone these family transitions miss out on better career opportunities, make poor choices on partners, and may experience problems.

"However, our research has shown that early family choices may be a productive option for many young adults, especially those who are disadvantaged with respect to family income, parental education and structure, mother-child relationship, verbal ability, school attachment and delinquent behavior," he notes.

Booth, Elisa Rustenbach, graduate student in sociology, and Susan McHale, professor of human development and family studies, examined the family and personal characteristics of more than 8,000 young adults who participated in the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health). Half of the sample made an early family transition and half did not over a five-year period.

The researchers compared the depressive symptoms of those who made a transition with those who did not, and found very few differences in depressive symptoms between the two groups.

"The only exception was women who experienced a breakup of their live-in relationship. They were more likely to see an increase in depression compared to women who did not break up with the live-in partner or did not make a transition," Booth notes. Only 14 percent of those who made a transition were in this category.

The researchers selected depressive symptoms as a measure of wellbeing because they are associated with many types of adversity such as poor physical health, unemployment and harsh family relationships, and apply to males and females and people of all ages.

"The findings are even more remarkable when we take into account that young adults who transitioned into early families were more likely to come from low-income families, had parents with lower levels of education and likely lived in a household with one or no biological parents," Booth says.

In low-income families, teens may experience a divisive home environment and parents with poor parenting skills. Leaving to live together, marry or have children may provide an opportunity to escape from an unloving home and create a more positive family, according to the study.

The difference between men and women on early family transitions and protective family factors requires more study, however, he adds.

"Most research on emerging adulthood has been on college students," Booth notes. "Our study highlights the importance of study early family transitions in context, in light of the range of opportunities open to a person. Post-high school experiences of young adults are more diverse than popular belief, and early co-habitation or marriage and parenting may be productive for many young people, at least over the short haul."

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Rapid Communication Networks Less Likely to Shape Individual Behavior

The increasingly interconnected world has made it easier for information and disease to spread. However a new study from Harvard University and Cornell University shows that fewer “degrees of separation” can make social networks too weak to disseminate behavioral change.

The finding that “small world” networks are limited in their power to shape individual behavior could have implications for health care policy and the treatment of epidemics.

Published in the November American Journal of Sociology, the study was led by Damon Centola, a Robert Wood Johnson Fellow with the Institute for Quantitative Social Science in Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, with Michael Macy of Cornell. The work was done while Centola was a doctoral candidate at Cornell.

“Our research shows that the difference between contagions that spread through simple contact, such as diseases and information, and the spread of behavior, which requires multiple contacts, has important consequences,” says Centola. “We find that while making the world smaller increases the speed at which diseases and information can spread, it can actually slow down, and even prevent, the spread of health behaviors.”

Social networks consist of connections between individuals, whether they are short ties among family or good friends or long ties, as among acquaintances. Long ties are good for hearing about a job opening or housing opportunity since they provide new information that is not already circulating in your closely connected social network. However, when it comes to getting a cholesterol screening or going on a diet, you are more likely to get reinforcing signals from co-workers or neighbors who know each other and can collectively encourage you to change your behavior.

Previous studies have shown that long ties are highly effective at rapidly diffusing information among disparate social groups, and relatively few long ties are necessary to create the effect. Called the “small world theory,” this is exemplified in the idea that everyone on earth is connected by “six degrees of separation.” Extensions of the small world theory have argued that anything to be diffused can travel faster as the world becomes smaller, but this study disproves that generalization.

Most information and diseases have a threshold of one, meaning that contact with one network neighbor is sufficient to pass the contagion to another. Information or diseases can be spread along long ties because reinforcement from multiple sources is not required. However, many changes in behavior have a threshold of greater than one, such as the adoption of a new technology, diet, or exercise routine. In these cases, social affirmation or reinforcement from multiple sources is frequently required, making an isolated contact insufficient to persuade an individual to change her habits.

Using the “small world” model of social networks, the researchers showed that as the connectedness of the world increases, the level of local social reinforcement decreases. While people can get more information from more sources (and are susceptible to contact with greater numbers of germs), they simultaneously have fewer contacts who are connected to each other who can coordinate to provide social reinforcement for desired behavior change.

Closely knit ties are less effective for spreading information because of the increased likelihood that these individuals will know the same people, causing redundancy and repetition of information. However, the same redundancy that inhibits the spread of information provides vital channels of reinforcement for fostering changes in behavior. If social clustering is reduced too much, it may altogether prevent coordination on behaviors that require social reinforcement.

“As the world becomes smaller, these changes in social networks can reduce the ability to spread behaviors that are hard to adopt,” says Centola. “For health agencies, this suggests that the spanning networks that allow disease to spread so rapidly may not be as good for changing behavior. Rather, it may be better to focus on building and extending local, community networks, and encouraging grass roots support for desired behaviors.”

Current research extends these findings into the realm of “virtual” communities. At Harvard, Centola is investigating how building online networks affects the diffusion of health behaviors, while Macy at Cornell is using online data to study the spread of innovations.

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Birds of a Feather: Analysis Suggests People of Similar Income, Education Gravitate Toward Same Neighborhoods

Residential neighborhoods throughout U.S. metropolitan areas have become increasingly divided into high- and low-unemployment sections, and an analysis by an economist with the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis suggests that people may be "sorting"themselves by both income and education.

The analysis was conducted by Christopher Wheeler, writing in theMarch/April issue of Review, the Reserve Bank's bimonthly journal of economic and business issues. The publication is also available online at the St. Louis Fed's web site.

The rate of unemployment is one of the most basic indicators used togauge the economy's health. As the economy fluctuates between periods ofexpansion and recession, corresponding changes in the rate of unemploymentare observed.

Between 1980 and 2000, the aggregate national unemployment rate fell from 6.3 percent to 3.9 percent, suggesting that workers in the United States faced better unemployment prospects in 2000 than in 1980.

"Yet, underlying these figures," says Wheeler, "is a trend that is not widely known: Unemployed workers became increasingly concentrated in certain neighborhoods within the nation's metropolitan areas. That is, neighborhoods in the United States became increasingly polarized into two groups: those with high rates of unemployment and those with low rates."

Wheeler investigated three possible explanations for this trend:

• Urban decentralization; that is, the gradual movement of people from the central cities to the suburbs. "This may have reduced the employment opportunities of households that continue to live in historical city centers," says Wheeler, "thereby creating a cluster of joblessness within those inner-cities."
• Changes in the labor market, such as declining union membership and the shift of employment away from manufacturing toward other sectors, may have reduced the employment opportunities for workers in certain neighborhoods more than others. "For example," says Wheeler, "if a city's low-to-middle-income communities are populated primarily by manufacturing workers, a decline in the manufacturing sector could result in higher unemployment in those areas. By the same token, if the residents of another neighborhood are employed predominantly in high-paying professional services, then a rise in the demand for those services may result in more jobs."
• Possible increase in the extent to which skilled and un-skilled workers are segregated across residential areas. "In other words, independent of either urban decentralization or shifts in union and industrial activity, the degree to which high- and low-skilled workers live in the same neighborhoods may have decreased over time could lead to a rising concentration of unemployed people." Analyzing unemployment data across nine broad industrial sectors, Wheeler finds little evidence to support the first two explanations. His results, however, did reveal a strong association between unemployment concentration and measures of both income segmentation and the segregation of college graduates across neighborhoods.

"A rising concentration of those who are unemployed seems to be related to an increase in the extent to which households have separated themselves into certain neighborhoods by both income and education," concludes Wheeler.


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