INTERGENERATIONAL PANEL STUDY OF PARENTS AND CHILDREN

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This is a proposal to study the family formation and dissolution experiences of young adults. The primary focus of the project centers on four broad interrelated areas of family life--cohabitation, marriage, childbearing, and marital dissolution. This research will investigate both the determinants and consequences of family formation and dissolution during the young adult years. The rapid pace of recent changes in familial behavior and attitudes and the importance of young adult decisions for their future lives make research concerning family formation and dissolution particularly timely. This research will extend an existing longitudinal body of data on a cohort of young adults and their mothers. The mothers, each of whom had borne a child in 1961, were interviewed seven times from 1962 to 1985. The child born in 1961 was included in the study in both 1980 (at age 18) and 1985 (at age 23). Response rates have been unusually high, and there is a full set of interviews across all waves of the study from mothers and children in 82 percent of the families originally included in 1962. The 1962-1985 data set contains a wide range of information from both mothers and children. The 1985 survey used a life history calendar to obtain from the young adults monthly retrospective data about their living arrangements, cohabitation, marriage, childbearing, schooling, and work. The proposed research will reinterview these mothers and children in 1993, extending the data to cover the experiences of the children and their families as the children mature into their early thirties. More than 97 percent of the mothers and children interviewed in 1980 were also interviewed in 1985, and we expect similar rates of success for the 1993 reinterview. This 31-year intergenerational panel data will be used to examine four general issues. One is the influence of the parental family on the cohabitation, marriage, childbearing, and divorce experience of young adults, investigating the causal mechanisms that transmit the influence of parents to the behavior of their children. A second issue concerns the ways in which the family formation and dissolution experiences of young adults are influenced by attitudes, values, and religious commitment. A third area of research is the influence of living arrangements and cohabitation before marriage on subsequent marriage, marital dissolution, and childbearing. A final research topic concerns the ways in which the experiences of the young adults influence their parents.