Transitioning into Adulthood during the Great Recession

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Robert CrosnoeShannon E. CavanaghLeticia MarteletoUniversity of Texas at AustinThe Great Recession has generated widespread concerns that contemporary cohorts of youth making their way into adulthood are in danger of becoming a lost generation. This project explores these concerns by examining how the Great Recession has affected many of the statuses that signal the transition from adolescence into adulthood, including various aspects of socioeconomic attainment and family formation. Potential effects involve both the length of time that young people in their late teens and early twenties take to acquire these statuses and the various ways that they combine them. Special attention will be paid to the potential for these effects to vary across diverse racial/ethnic and socioeconomic groups in the U.S., across geographic locales that were more or less hard hit by the economic downturn, and across the U.S.-Canada border, given how the recession started here and then filtered northward. The theoretical value of this research lies in its ability to inject sociological and developmental thinking into considerations of macro-level economic processes, including the ways in which short-term historical events shape long-term trajectories, the potential for young adulthood to be a critical period in the life course, and the interplay of socioeconomic and family experiences. More practically, by unpacking the scarring effects of a major economic recession, this project will serve the future interests of the youth actually undergoing that recession as they age into the next generation of workers, parents, and citizens and identify future youth who may be especially vulnerable in any of the inevitable recessions yet to come. Overall, the goals of the study are to develop a multi-dimensional understanding of the specific case of young adults in the Great Recession that advances interdisciplinary thinking among scientists, inform the public about an issue of great interest, provide valuable training opportunities to graduate and undergraduate students, and better serve the interests of American youth.Drawing on life course concepts such as standardization and individualization as well as related areas of research, this project will test two set of competing hypotheses. First, did the Great Recession speed up or slow down the acquisition of major young adult statuses (e.g. full time employment, general higher education enrollment/STEM studies, marriage/partnership, and parenthood)? Second, did the Great Recession lead to more disordering or coupling of these statuses during young adulthood? To test these hypotheses, this project will apply multiple statistical tools (e.g., sibling fixed effects, latent class analysis, joint entropy calculations) to survey and geocode data from multiple 18-25 year old cohorts in the National Longitudinal Study of Youth 1979-Young Adult Survey. The prevalence of young adult school and work statuses (in general, within STEM) will be compared across multiple points before and after the start of the Great Recession (specifically, 2004, 2006, 2008, and 2010) and in relation to variable state and local economic conditions (e.g., unemployment rates). Moreover, the ways in which these statuses go along with (or not) with partnership and parenting before, during, and after the Great Recession will be assessed, with special attention to socioeconomic, racial/ethnic, and gender disparities in these transitional patterns over time. Integrated data analysis and group modeling will then adapt the U.S. models to the Canadian National Longitudinal Survey of Children and Youth for a selected cross-national comparison designed to shed light on the U.S. case.