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Title: Adolescent Childbearing and High School Completion in the 1980s: Have Things Changed?
Resulting in 1 citation.
1. Upchurch, Dawn M.
McCarthy, James
Adolescent Childbearing and High School Completion in the 1980s: Have Things Changed?
Family Planning Perspectives 21,5 (September-October 1989): 199-202.
Also: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2135571
Cohort(s): Mature Women, NLSY79, Young Women
Publisher: Alan Guttmacher Institute
Keyword(s): Adolescent Fertility; Age at First Birth; Childbearing; Childbearing, Adolescent; Fertility; First Birth; High School Completion/Graduates; Intergenerational Patterns/Transmission; Mothers; Racial Differences; Socioeconomic Status (SES)

Permission to reprint the abstract has not been received from the publisher.

This paper explores the trends in the association between age at first birth and high school completion over the past thirty years. Data from three national surveys of women, the NLS of Mature Women, Young Women, and NLSY, were utilized in order to examine the experiences of women who were adolescents from the 1950s through the early 1980s. It was found that differentials in percentages completing high school by age at first birth persisted, but were considerably smaller in 1986 than they were in 1958. This convergence occurred because increases in the percentages of school-age mothers graduating from 1958 to 1986 were greater than the gains achieved by all women. However, there were differences by race in the concentration of these gains between 1958 and 1986. Young white mothers experienced the greatest increases between 1975 and 1986, whereas the largest gains for young black mothers were in the earlier period, from 1958 to 1975. To examine changes by socioeconomic status, within racial groups, the authors focused more closely on the period from 1975 to 1986 and found that school-age mothers from more disadvantaged backgrounds had the greatest gains in percent graduating, but that differentials by socioeconomic status persisted in 1986, with more advantaged black and white young mothers still more likely to graduate than their less advantaged counterparts.
Bibliography Citation
Upchurch, Dawn M. and James McCarthy. "Adolescent Childbearing and High School Completion in the 1980s: Have Things Changed?" Family Planning Perspectives 21,5 (September-October 1989): 199-202.