Semiautonomy and Leaving Home in Early Adulthood

Studies of leaving home in early adulthood have been inconsistent in whether semiautonomous, nonhousehold-based living arrangements such as dormitories, barracks, and other group quarters are included as away from home. This study uses data from the National Longitudinal Study of the High School Class of 1972 to track the living arrangements sequences of young adults in order to clarify how semiautonomy should best be treated. We examine how many experience it and when; how it is associated with other roles early in adulthood; how its treatment affects the measurement of age at leaving home; and what consequences the expe-rience of semiautonomy has for living arrangements in later years. We find that semiautonomy is intermediate in many ways between living with parents and maintaining a separate household. In the transition to adulthood there is often an intermediate step between leaving the parental home and establishing an independent residence. College dormitories and military barracks are currently the most common locus of what we will call residential semiautonomy, although board-ing and lodging houses also provide temporary housing for some young adults. Many different forms of nonfamily-based living arrangements have characterized other times and places, associated particularly with apprenticeship and domestic service (Hajnal 1982; Katz 1975; Wall 1978). What unites them all, however, is that they are primarily peopled by young adults who have residentially separated from their parents but have not yet established a family of their own.