Search Results

A modest relationship was found between employment experiences and crime involvement. Those who were employed were less likely to report committing a crime in the year prior to their interview. Those involved in low skilled, less satisfying, and/or temporary jobs were more likely to have committed crimes. These findings, however, were true only for the young adults in urban areas, not those in rural areas. In rural areas, employment was unrelated to young adult criminality. Neighborhood characteristics were found to have little direct influence on the criminal behavior of young adults, and the fact or characteristics of employment were not related to the level of disadvantage of the neighborhood where respondents lived. Apparently local labor markets were more important than neighborhood characteristics in determining employment experiences. Educational experience, most notably attachment to school and to lesser extent respondents' grades, was modestly related to criminal behavior. The influence of grades on delinquency was conditioned by neighborhood disadvantage, the proportion of residents in marginal jobs, and the proportion of adults who held high school diplomas. The researchers recommend making school and educational experience the primary focus for delinquency prevention. The two datasets used in the study are referred to as the Children of the NLSY and the NLSY97. These data were combined with the 2000 census data. The NLSY97 cohort consists of approximately 9,000 youths, ages 12-16, initially assessed in 1997 and followed every year thereafter. It is designed to represent youths living in the United States in 1997 who were born in the years 1980-84. The respondents were between the ages of 18 and 20 when last interviewed.

For low-propensity individuals, recessionary contexts increased the effects of college on employment and earnings, but not on wages.

For high-propensity individuals, the opposite pattern occurred, with college effects on wages increasing during recessionary contexts.

Results are consistent with labor queues, where reductions in available jobs causes more desired workers to displace less desirable workers below them in the queue

In light of the results provided in Chapter 1, in Chapter 2 I study the contribution of the main determinants of wage gains from job changes to the early-career gender wage gap among highly-educated American workers.

The key finding is that weight lowers wages for white females. Negative correlations between weight and wages observed for other gender-ethnic groups appear to be due to unobserved heterogeneity. The results also suggested that the weight penalty, if it exists, increases with wages for almost all sub-groups except Black males. Finally, the negative effect of weight appears to have decreased when we compare the weight penalty between two cohorts, NLSY79 cohort and NLSY97 cohort, aged between 19 and 29. More research is needed so that we can gain insights about the causes of these penalties. It also provides incentives for policy makers to come up with policies that will help people attain and maintain a healthy weight.

Using nine nationally representative cohorts (NSLY79, NSAM88, NSFG88, NSAM95, NSFG95, ADD-Health, NLSY97, NSFG2002, and NLSY79YA), we examine cohort and sex differences in being sexually experienced and corroborate associations and trends across different data sets. Our samples are limited to male and female never-married youth ages 15 to 19 at the time they were reporting on their sexual behavior. We identify trends over time in being sexually experienced for 15 to 19 year old males and females. We find a monotonic decrease in the percent of 15-19 year old males being sexually experienced over cohorts. For females aged 15-19, we find an increase and then decrease from earlier to later cohorts. These results have significant implications for public health sexual outcomes among youth and for studies that examine sexually experienced youth, especially timing of first sex.

The second chapter is an empirical analysis of public expenditure composition and economic growth. Many countries have adopted across-the-board cuts in the course of reform programs that are not desirable from the efficiency and equity perspectives, nor are they sustainable over time. For these countries, releasing resources for critical public programs and securing fiscal adjustment is absolutely necessary. We do a cross-country comparison to find out the productive and unproductive components of government expenditures and assess whether a change in the composition would have positive growth effects. We conclude that the composition-mix has different effects on growth for countries at different stages of development. There is a threshold effect for some categories of expenditure and so management of these resources is very important.

In the third chapter, we discuss issues whether eliminating the digital divide and providing home computers is a way for human capital formation for countries. Although computers are universal in the classroom, nearly twenty million children in the United States do not have computers in their homes. There is a big role of home computers in the educational protect and thus human capital formation. Home computers might be very useful for completing school assignments, but they might also represent a distraction for teenagers. We use several identification strategies and panel data from the two main U.S. datasets that include recent information on computer ownership among children--the 2000-2003 CPS Computer and Internet Use Supplements (CIUS) matched to the CPS Basic Monthly Files and the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997--to explore the causal relationship between computer ownership and high school graduation and other educational outcomes. Teenagers who have access to home computers are 6 to 8 percentage points more likely to graduate from high school than teenagers who do not have home computers after controlling for individual, parental, and family characteristics. We generally find evidence of positive relationships between home computers and educational outcomes using several identification strategies, including controlling for typically unobservable home environment and extracurricular activities in the NLSY97, fixed effects models, instrumental variables and including future computer ownership and falsification tests. Home computers may increase high school graduation by reducing non-productive activities, such as truancy and crime, among children in addition to making it easier to complete school assignments.

Whites and different minority groups approach their education in different ways due to their upbringing and differences in culture. The aim of this research is to investigate the role of family income and family background characteristics on educational attainment of individuals. This analysis focuses on grade 9 completion, high school graduation, and college enrollment behavior for both males and females by ethnicity/race. In particular, this study compares the schooling attainment behavior of Asians with the other three ethnic/racial groups. Variables related to family income, family background, cognitive ability, and income returns to education are studied to see their effect on the schooling choices of Asians and how that compares to Whites and the other minority groups over time, as it is important to determine and understand the factors that primarily contribute to the outstanding educational success of Asians. The educational attainment models are estimated using Probit method with the data taken from three different sources namely NLSY97, CPS (1980 and 2000) and Census (1980 and 2000).

The results show that the influence of Asian mothers' schooling on their child's education is substantially lower than the mothers from the other three ethnic/racial groups and this could possibly be due to their higher overall expectations for their children compared to the other three groups, as the sole interest of Asian parents lie in their child's education and academic accomplishments. Family income has a positive and significant influence on achieving education for all racial/ethnic groups in 1980 and 2000. The effect decreases in most cases from 1980 to 2000 for all groups which could suggest less reliance on family income and availability of other sources of financing education and also increased importance of attaining higher levels of education. Income returns to education has a greater impact on grade 9 and high school completion for both Blacks and Hispanics in most cases compared to Whites and Asians, suggesting higher educational and earnings aspirations for the latter two groups.

The second essay asks whether the effect of father presence varies by maternal age in two adolescent outcomes, math achievement scores and early cigarette smoking. The increased incidence of first births among women age 30 or over suggests study of this population as researchers have investigated births to younger women. Positive effects of father presence are found for a range of child and adolescent outcomes among children at all birth timings, but theories of parenting and empirical differences in older and younger mothers suggest that the father presence effect may vary by maternal age. Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, 1997 Cohort, I find that the effect of father presence increases with maternal age for both math achievement and deferred smoking. The change is attributable to observable parental characteristics that are correlated with maternal age rather than a pure effect of maternal age.

Respondents of the NLSY97 were born in the years 1980-84 and were 16 to 20 years old in the fourth round of annual interviews. Although the response rates for the first three rounds of interviewing were above 90 percent, the response rate for Round 3 was slightly lower than that of Round 2. The payment incentive during the first three rounds was constant at $10 and was paid by the field interviewer at the completion of the interview. Concerned over the decline in responses rates and its implication for future rounds, the sponsor of the study, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), applied for and received approval from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to conduct an experiment manipulating the timing of payment and the level of respondent fee paid. The interviews for the NLSY97 are conducted by the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) of the University of Chicago under contract to the BLS. The experiment had two treatments: (1) payment of the fee prior to scheduling the in-person interview; and (2) increases in respondent fees.

This paper explores these hypotheses using data from the US National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 and 1997 cohorts. The NLSY79 dataset follows a cohort of approximately 10,000 respondents born between 1957 and 1964, with data available in survey waves from 1979 to 2014; while the NLSY97 follows another cohort of nearly 9,000 respondents born between 1980 and 1984, with data available between 1997 and 2015. A random effects logit model is used to track and identify individual health outcomes as workers in these cohorts move in and out of performance pay, isolating the impact over time and testing for cumulative effects. The results identify a statistically significant link between performance pay and poor worker health, effects that are attenuated for susceptible sub-groups of workers, including female, minority, and low-income workers.

Methods: A Monte Carlo framework is formed and informed using data collected from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY). The model has 2 portions: one that generates childbirth events on an annual basis and another that produces a BMI for each child. Once the model is informed using the data, a reference distribution of offspring BMIs is simulated. We quantify the effects of our factors of interest by removing them from the model and comparing the resulting offspring BMI distributions with that of the baseline scenario.

Results: An association between maternal BMI and number of offspring is evidenced in the NLSY data as well as the presence of AM. These 2 factors combined are associated with an increased mean BMI (+0.067, 95% CI: 0.056; 0.078), an increased BMI variance (+0.578, 95% CI: 0.418; 0.736) and an increased prevalence of obesity (RR 1.032, 95% CI: 1.023; 1.041) and BMIs >40 (RR 1.083, 95% CI: 1.053; 1.118) among offspring.

Conclusion: Our investigation suggests that both differential realized fertility and AM by BMI appear to play a role in the increasing prevalence of obesity in America.

Copyright of Marriage & Family Review is the property of Haworth Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Marriage & Family Review is the property of Haworth Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Marriage & Family Review is the property of Haworth Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

We then interact these statistics with the Opportunity Atlas data to create an "opportunity atlas" for LGBTQ+ individuals.

Copyright of Journal of Economics & Finance is the property of Springer Science & Business Media B.V. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Chapter 1 looks at cohort and generation differences in levels and predictors of early fertility and sex among first, second, and third-plus generation young adults in the U.S. during the late 1970s and 1990s. The analyses seek to determine (1) how this behavior has changed by generation and arrival cohort and (2) what family and community factors predict these outcomes for immigrants. The study finds that first-generation immigrant youth exhibit the lowest levels of early fertility and sex, negatively assimilating by the third-plus generation. The findings suggest a positive association between arrival cohort early sex only. Further, the research fails to uncover significant predictors of these outcomes among first and second generation immigrants although the measures used have long been associated with them in the general population--suggesting that protective effects of generation reflect unmeasured cultural and social mechanisms.

Chapter 2 examines whether welfare policy changes occurring in the 1990s altered fertility outcomes for low-educated and unmarried foreign-born women. The study also looks at whether welfare reform had unintended consequences on immigrant women, like reducing prenatal care or decreasing the fertility of welfare-eligible or non-welfare dependent women through "chilling effects." The results show no consistent evidence that welfare policy changed fertility behavior among any immigrant group and raises doubt concerning the usefulness of targeting women's childbearing decisions with economic incentives.

Study Design: Retrospective cross-sectional analysis of two existing national population-based surveys: the National Ambulatory Medical Care Survey (NAMCS) and National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY). Pilot studies by us have demonstrated the usefulness of these databases in providing new information about occupational health care. This study will result in descriptive analyses of work-related cases from each database, including stratified sub-analyses comparing patient experiences among racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic patient groups, and selected multivariate analyses to assess the interactive effect of patient sociodemographic characteristics with employment experiences, medical services, and vocational outcomes.

Population Studied: The NAMCS covers physician-reported data for a nationally representative sample of 46,875 ambulatory medical care visits made in 1997-1998. 1,179 of those visits (2.5%) were for diagnosis and treatment of work-related conditions. Our analysis of the NLSY covers the experiences of 7,508 persons aged 33-4 who were interviewed in 1 998, of which 563 (7.5%) self-reported experiencing an occupational injury or illnesses in the 2-year period preceding the interview.

Principal Findings: Both analyses suggest that there are significant disparities among the social groups studied. In the NAMCS, Hispanics with work-related conditions required insurer authorization for care 57% more often than non-Hispanics, and Blacks 1 4% more often than whites. On average, Blacks saw a physician during their visit 6% less often than whites, and Hispanics 5% less often than non-Hispanics. Blacks had blood pressure measured at the visit 32% less often than whites, and Hispanics 11 % less often than non-Hispanics. The NLSY analysis indicated that following a work-related condition, Blacks were 1 6% more likely to miss work, had 28% more missed work days, and were 18% more likely to lose wages than non-Blacks. Similar patterns were observed among Hispanics compared to non-Hispanics, and low-SES (as indicated by educational attainment and family income) compared to high-SES workers.

Conclusions: Preliminary data from two national health care surveys indicates disparities in occupational health and health care for work-related conditions based on patients' race, ethnicity, and SES. These studies have demonstrated the usefulness of national survey databases as a novel source for collecting information about the health and vocational experiences of injured workers.

Implications for Policy, Delivery or Practice: This study helps demonstrate the barriers that Black, Hispanic, and low-SES workers face in accessing occupational health care, and their susceptibility to more severe vocational impacts following a work-related injury. These findings will help alert policymakers and public health advocates to the need to devise specific strategies for protecting the health and earning capacity of minority and low-wage workers.

Method: The National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 database was used to highlight different linear and nonlinear (quadratic and logistic) growth models via growth curve modeling (GCM) and growth mixture modeling (GMM). The specific focus was on changes in cigarette/alcohol consumption and depression throughout adolescence and young adulthood. Specifically, a nationally representative group of individuals between the ages of 12 and 16 years were assessed at 4 time-points for levels of cigarette consumption, alcohol use, and depression.

Results: The results for each example illustrated different patterns of linear and nonlinear growth via GCM and GMM through the versatile Bayesian estimation framework.

Conclusions: Growth models may benefit from the Bayesian perspective by incorporating prior information or knowledge into the model, especially when sample sizes are small or growth is nonlinear. A step-by-step tutorial for assessing various growth models via the Bayesian perspective is provided as online supplemental material. (PsycINFO Database Record © 2014 APA, all rights reserved)

A poor match between student and school characteristics can have a number of negative consequences for the student. Workers receive an extra wage premium for attending a high quality college, so a student who attends a school for which she is overqualified may be foregoing some of her potential returns to attending college. Students who are over- or under-qualified for their school may be less likely to graduate and more likely to transfer or take extra time to complete their degree.

The implications of their findings are astounding, especially when girls do better than boys in school by 8th grade and continue to widen their lead over boys in education attainment. Because our economy rewards educational attainment and punishes the lack of it, could women soon become the primary economic drivers of the U.S. economy?

Methods: This study used data of 8173 participants from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 who were 13-17 years old in 1997. Surveys occurred annually until 2011 then biennially until 2017, when participants were 33-37 years old. The Mental Health Inventory-5 measured mental health at eight survey cycles between 2000 and 2017. Employment earnings were measured annually between 1998 and 2017. Latent parallel trajectories were estimated using latent growth modeling. Multinomial logistic regression explored the association between baseline factors and trajectory membership.

Results: Four parallel latent classes were identified; all showed stable mental health and increasing earnings. Three percent of the sample showed a good mental health, steep increasing earnings trajectory (average 2017 earnings ~ $196,000); 23% followed a good mental health, medium increasing earnings trajectory (average 2017 earnings ~ $78,100); 50% followed a good mental health, low increasing earnings trajectory (average 2017 earnings ~ $39,500); and 24% followed a poor mental, lowest increasing earnings trajectory (average 2017 earnings ~ $32,000). Participants who were younger, women, Black or Hispanic, from lower socioeconomic households, and reported poorer health behaviors had higher odds of belonging to the poor mental health, low earnings class.

Results: Trajectories of all the 4 forms of substance use were associated with handgun-carrying trajectories. Specifically, the risk of being in the declining trajectory of handgun carrying (compared with that of being in the very-low trajectory) was higher for participants who were in the decreasing trajectories of smoking, drinking, marijuana use, and hard drug use and lower for those who were in the increasing trajectory of drinking. Inversely, the risks of being in the low and high-increasing trajectories of handgun carrying (compared with that of being in the very-low trajectory) were higher for participants who were in the increasing trajectory of hard drug use.

Methods: Using panel data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997, we estimated longitudinal trajectories of handgun carrying among urban Americans, who carried a handgun at least once between 1997 and 2011 (N = 1,574). Multinomial logistic regression analyses examined risk factors associated with handgun-carrying trajectory groups during late adolescence (ages 16-20), emerging adulthood (ages 20-24), and young established adulthood (ages 24-28).

Methods: Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 (NLSY97), we delineated age-specific patterns of handgun carrying in the urban United States and investigated how onset age, duration, and timing of handgun carrying affected criminal offending, substance use, police arrest, and educational and economic achievements in established adulthood.

Results: There is important heterogeneity in individuals' handgun carrying behavior over time in the urban United States. Developmental features of handgun carrying are significant predictors of negative life outcomes in a variety of domains.

Methods: We linked person-level gun carrying data from a nationally representative sample of U.S. youth and young adults with state-level gun policies over a 15-year period. Cross-classified mixed effects logistic regressions estimated the associations between state gun policies and handgun carrying and explored whether the associations varied by person-level demographic characteristics.

Results: Youth and young adults in states with a greater number of gun policies were less likely to carry a handgun than youth and young adults in states with fewer gun policies. Regulations on gun purchasing, concealed carrying permitting, and domestic violence-related laws were particularly important in reducing youth/young adult gun-carrying behavior. In addition, these associations varied by gender and race/ethnicity.

Discussion: State firearm legislation may be an effective mechanism to reduce youth and young adult gun carrying and ultimately mitigate gun-related mortality and morbidity.

Objective: To examine the relationship between work-related injuries and multiple occupational and non-occupational factors among construction workers in the USA.

Methods: Data from the 1988-2000 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, 1979 cohort (N=12,686) were analyzed. Job exposures and health behaviors were examined and used as independent variables in four multivariate logistic regression models to identify associations with occupational injuries.

Results: After controlling for demographic variables, occupational injuries were 18% (95% CI: 1.04-1.34) more likely in construction than in non-construction. Blue-collar occupations, job physical efforts, multiple jobs, and long working hours accounted for the escalated risk in construction. Smoking, obesity/overweight, and cocaine use significantly increased the risk of work-related injury when demographics and occupational factors were held constant.

Conclusions: Workplace injuries are better explained by simultaneously examining occupational and non-occupational characteristics

Methods: Data were drawn from 4,079 male and 4,059 female participants of the National Longitudinal Study of Youth 1997, aged 12-16 years at the first assessment. Cox proportional hazards regression models were estimated predicting age at first sexual intercourse from age at first alcohol use, without and with adjustment for correlated sociodemographic and individual- and family-level risk factors. Analyses were conducted separately for males and females, with interactions between alcohol use and respondent sex (female vs. male) modeled in subsidiary analyses.

Results: Onset of first drink was strongly predictive of earlier sexual intercourse for both males and females, with effects of drinking most pronounced for females during early adolescence.

In the second chapter, we explore one aspect of U.S. education that has not garnered a lot of attention until fairly recently that is occupational choice. We add an education sector to an otherwise standard Hsieh et al. (2019)-style model to explore the extent to which changes in career opportunities in other occupations affect the selection of workers into teaching careers. In our model, changes in the allocation of teaching talent have implications for the evolution of class size as well as quality of instruction and hence the accumulation of human capital during the workers' formative years. This gives rise to a trade-off between static and dynamic efficiency, which we quantify by way of a structural model.

We take a new look at this puzzle by investigating trends in the income-based gaps in completed schooling and early- and mid-career earnings and family income using data from the two cohorts of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY79 and NLSY97) as well as 31 birth cohorts from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID). Our procedures are detailed in an appendix.

The study compared results from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth in 1980 and 2000, which is the latest date for which detailed data are available. Surveyors asked youth whether they had stolen, destroyed property, attacked someone or sold drugs in the last year. Of the boys between the ages of 15 and 18 surveyed in 1980, 59 percent said they had, compared to just 28 percent of similarly aged boys surveyed in 2000.

Copyright of Journal of Child & Family Studies is the property of Springer Science & Business Media B.V. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts)

The second essay tests whether the theoretic model that explains the racial wage gap can also explain the gender wage gap. Specifically, I test whether the correlation between AFQT and wage is stronger for a employer-employee couple that shares the same gender than for a couple with opposite genders. I find that the data does not support this hypothesis.

Method: Using the 1997 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth and the family financial socialization model, we constructed a structural framework in which we could examine whether two aspects of family financial socialization, parenting style and receiving allowance, influenced young adults' propensity to seek financial advice. Also, the mediating roles of personality traits, financial risk tolerance, and financial knowledge were examined.

Results: Personality traits, financial risk tolerance, and financial knowledge were directly associated with financial advice-seeking behavior. Parenting style and receiving allowance during adolescence were indirectly associated with young adults' financial advice-seeking behavior. Additional analyses by gender showed significant differences in the direct and indirect associations among financial socialization factors, personality traits, and financial advice-seeking behavior between men and women.

Methods: Data were analyzed from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997, a nationally representative prospective survey. Our sample is comprised of youth aged 12-16 at baseline in 1997 and interviewed annually through 2009 (ages 24-28; N=7,772). Cumulative self-reported childhood trauma was summed across five areas: 1) violent crime; 2) bullying; 3) gun violence; 4) perceived school safety; and 5) threatened violence. After each participant turned 18, his/her yearly 2002 Census job code was assigned a yearly occupational prestige score based on the 1989 General Social Survey rankings. Covariate-adjusted marginal linear regression models were used to estimate the effects of trauma and covariates on prestige for different race/ethnicity (white, Black, Hispanic) and gender subgroups.

Results: Results indicated that white females (mean=1.17±standard error =0.19; p<0.00) and white males (mean=0.35±0.18; p=0.04) lost the most prestige points in future occupations for every childhood traumatic occurrence. More traumatic occurrences resulted in a slower growth in occupational prestige over time for white females, with each additional victimization occurrence associated with an annual loss in prestige of 0.29 points (p<0.05).

Discussion: Results indicate that white males and females were the most severely affected groups with respect to their future occupation. Psychological and other social interventions specifically designed to mitigate the consequences of childhood trauma may positively impact future socioeconomic status.

Methods: A nationally representative sample of 8,901 young adults aged 18-28 surveyed between 1999-2009 from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 (NLSY) were analyzed. Covariate-adjusted multivariate linear regression and path models were used to estimate the effects of victimization and covariates on income and prestige levels and on income and prestige trajectories. After each participant turned 18, their annual 2002 Census job code was assigned a yearly prestige score based on the 1989 General Social Survey, and their annual income was calculated via self-reports. Occupational prestige and annual income are time-varying variables measured from 1999-2009. Victimization effects were tested for moderation by sex, race, and ethnicity in the multivariate models.

Results: Approximately half of our sample reported at least one instance of childhood victimization before the age of 18. Major findings include 1) childhood victimization resulted in slower income and prestige growth over time, and 2) mediation analyses suggested that this slower prestige and earnings arose because victims did not get the same amount of education as non-victims.

Methods: Data from two separate studies were used: a national sample of 3,436 14–18-year-old adolescents and a regional sample of 124 seventh graders and 132 ninth graders, 12–16 years old. Participants were asked about their chance of dying in the next year and before age 20, and about the extent of various threats to their physical well-being.

Results: Adolescents in both samples greatly overestimated their chance of dying. Those mortality estimates were higher for adolescents who reported direct threats (e.g., an unsafe neighborhood). Thus, adolescents were sensitive to the relative size of threats to their survival, but not to the implications for absolute risk levels.

Conclusions: Contrary to the folk wisdom that adolescents have a unique sense of invulnerability, the individuals studied here reported an exaggerated sense of mortality, which was highest among those reporting greater threats in their lives. Such fears could affect adolescents' short-term well-being and future planning. Copyright 2009 Society for Adolescent Medicine. All rights reserved.

METHODS: This study uses data from rounds 1 to 7 (1997-2003) of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, 1997 Cohort (NLSY97). The sample consists of 6748 youth born between January 1, 1980, and December 31, 1984. Data on one of the youths' parents were also included in the baseline of the survey. Analyses were conducted using polychoric correlations and ordinal logistic regression.

RESULTS: Self-reported health of adolescents over a 7-year period indicated moderate stability (40% agreement after 7 years for girls and 41% for boys). Concordance was also present between parents and their children, although the association was higher among same-gender pairings (mother-daughter and father-son concordances). Adolescents' self-reported health was also linked with the presence or absence of chronic health conditions, emotional problems, and with being overweight or obese but not with sensory conditions or physical deformity.

CONCLUSIONS: Self-reported health is stable from early and middle adolescence to young adulthood. Self-reported health is also a valid measure of a variety of physical and emotional dimensions of adolescent well-being. The stability and validity of self-reported health do not differ by the gender of the child, although there is slightly greater concordance when the reporting parent is the same gender as the child.

These numbers come from the latest iteration, conducted from February through May of last year, of a long-running longitudinal survey of 8,984 people born in the U.S. from 1980 through 1984.

Understanding the causes of current racial inequality is a subject of intense debate. A wide variety of explanations have been put forth, which range from genetics (Jensen, 1973; Rushton, 1995) to personal and institutional discrimination (Darity and Mason, 1998; Pager, 2007; Krieger and Sidney, 1996) to the cultural backwardness of minority groups (Reuter, 1945; Shukla, 1971). Renowned sociologist William Julius Wilson argues that a potent interaction between poverty and racial discrimination can explain current disparities (Wilson, 2010).

Decomposing the share of inequality attributable to these explanations is exceedingly difficult, as experiments (field, quasi-, or natural) or other means of credible identification are rarely available. Even in cases where experiments are used (i.e., audit studies), it is unclear precisely what is being measured (Heckman, 1998). The lack of success in convincingly identifying root causes of racial inequality has often reduced the debate to a competition of "name that residual" -- arbitrarily assigning identity to unexplained differences between racial groups in economic outcomes after accounting for a set of confounding factors. The residuals are often interpreted as "discrimination," "culture," "genetics," and so on. Gaining a better understanding of the root causes of racial inequality is of tremendous importance for social policy, and the purpose of this chapter.

Within this challenging context the authors of this paper examine the support provided by nonresident parents (specifically fathers due to data limitations) to their children who live elsewhere. Specifically, we focus on how questions related to support provision are asked and what results are found. We examine eight separate data sets: six survey-based data sets, one a compilation of data from court records, and an extract of data from administrative records of a state public assistance program. The overriding objective of this paper is to gain a better understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of current data gathering approaches in this area. Our goal is to provide insights into ways we can improve our surveys in this important area of family demography.

Methods: Using data from the first wave of the National Longitudinal Study of Youth 1997 cohort (N = 6,466), a nationally representative sample of adolescents in the United States ages 12 to 17 in 1997, the study first examined the concordance between self and maternal reports of adolescents' general health status. Then, self and maternal reports of adolescents' general health status were each regressed on health-relevant covariates, and tests of differences in coefficients across the models were estimated.

Results: Self and maternal reports of adolescents' general health status are moderately concordant. Furthermore, the associations of adolescents' general health status with adolescent BMI and the adolescent being female significantly differ across reporters, such that the negative relationships are even more negative with self compared to maternal reports of adolescents' general health status. The associations of adolescents' general health status with the measures of adolescents' health limitations, maternal self-rated health, and certain sociodemographic covariates differ across reporters, such that each has a greater relationship with maternal compared to self-reports of adolescents' general health status.

Conclusion: The results are important for interpreting research on the causes and consequences of child and adolescent health, as results across studies may not be comparable if the reporter is not the same.