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The promotion of breastfeeding as the ?ideal? infant feeding method has become an important public health campaign to improve infant health in the United States. Researchers have consistently documented lower breastfeeding initiation and duration rates among African Americans, teenagers, and low-income mothers. This paper examines the factors associated with both breastfeeding initiation and duration among low-income women from diverse racial, ethnic and immigrant backgrounds in Philadelphia. In addition to examining the relationship between socio-demographic characteristics and infant feeding practice, as many previous studies have done, we also include measures of household conditions and privacy, maternal health behaviors during pregnancy, WIC participation, birth/pregnancy characteristics, and health care and hospital practices regarding breastfeeding promotion. We will investigate the relative importance of these various factors on racial and ethnic differences in breastfeeding initiation and duration among non-Hispanic white, non-Hispanic African Americans, immigrant blacks, Puerto Ricans and other Hispanic women, using data from the Community Roles in Birth Outcomes Study (CRIB). The analyses will provide insight into who decides to initiate breastfeeding among an inner-city population, who continues and for how long among those mothers who initiate, and how these patterns vary by race, ethnicity, and nativity status. We use breastfeeding practice to explore how individual behaviors and actions, especially among a "high-risk" population, need to be contextualized within the lives and circumstances within which they are shaped and enacted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]