Browsing by Subject "Sociology, Individual and Family Studies"

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    Kinship Status and Life Course Transitions as Determinants of Financial Assistance to Adult Children
    (2008-04-21) Remle, Robert Corey
    This dissertation contributes to the literature on intergenerational transfers by examining the dynamics of financial assistance provided by midlife parents to their adult children across the life course. This dissertation also examines whether the cumulative advantage hypothesis stretches across generational lines during co-occurring life course experiences so that financial transfers convey additional advantages to adult children. I use panel data from four waves of the Health and Retirement Study (1992, 1994, 1996 and 1998) to provide a broad picture of the process of financial assistance to younger adults within extended families. I constructed within-family trajectories of assistance to demonstrate that financial transfers are more common than previously estimated. Over 60% of all midlife-parent households gave $500 or more at least once and many parents gave multiple transfers and/or gave transfers to several adult children during a seven-year period. In an examination of kinship structures that differentiates between paternal children and maternal children within blended families, I use nonlinear logistic regression models to show that the decreased likelihood that fathers provided financial assistance to children from a previous marriage accounted solely for the reduction in transfers that all stepchildren received compared to biological children. Multilevel regression models demonstrate that transfer amounts are also influenced by kinship structures and parental resources. Additional analyses show adult child life course transitions related to schooling and coresidence were influential for parents' transfer behaviors while other life course transitions related to work, marriage, home ownership and the addition of a grandchild to the family were not influential. The number of life course transitions experienced by adult children during later waves significantly increased the likelihood of transfer receipt. However, the diversification of experiences over time made it difficult to pinpoint specific life course transitions relevant to financial assistance from parents. The strong impact of previous transfers upon the likelihood that adult children would receive transfers at later waves shows that patterns of repeated transfers were common for many intergenerational families. I argue that future research should analyze the impact of parental wealth on transfers and should explicitly examine parents' motives for giving money to adult children.
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    Trajectories of Social Role Occupancy and Health: An Intra-Individual Analysis of Role Enhancement, Strain, and Context
    (2010) Sautter, Jessica Marie

    This study examines whether trajectories of multiple social role occupancy, measured by level and dynamics of spouse, parent, and worker roles, are associated with mortality and concurrent trajectories of depressive symptoms and self-rated health. I frame hypotheses with role strain, role enhancement, role context, stress process, and life course theories to examine both within-person changes over age and between-person predictors of health status.

    I use data from the Americans' Changing Lives Study, a nationally representative accelerated cohort panel study of U.S. adults interviewed in 1986, 1989, 1994, and 2001/2 with mortality tracking through 2006. I use latent class analysis to estimate disaggregated trajectories of role occupancy, role strain, role satisfaction, depressive symptoms, and self-rated health across the adult life course. I then use multinomial and logistic regression analyses to examine associations between role trajectories and health outcomes.

    I find that (1) there is significant heterogeneity in trajectories of role occupancy and characteristics across the adult life course; (2) higher levels of social role occupancy are associated with better depressive symptom and mortality outcomes; (3) lower levels of role strain and higher levels of role satisfaction are associated with better depressive symptom outcomes, and (4); the association between role occupancy and health is robust to the inclusion of role characteristics. Thus, I find support for the role enhancement hypothesis in that higher levels of role occupancy are associated with better health outcomes irrespective of reward and strain associated with those roles.