Family Structure and the Risk of a Premarital Birth

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)