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Although many studies have examined the relationship of adiposity with neighborhood socioeconomic context in adults, few studies have investigated this relationship during adolescence. Using 10-year annual measurements of body mass index, expressed as z-scores (BMIz), obtained from 775 black and white participants of the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute Growth and Health Study, a prospective cohort study of girls from pre- to postadolescence, we used multilevel modeling to investigate whether family socioeconomic status (SES) and neighborhood socioeconomic characteristics (measured by census-tract median family income) explain variation in BMIz trajectory parameters. Analyses controlled for pubertal maturation. We found that lower SES was associated with higher overall levels of BMIz for both white and black girls. Additionally, lower-SES black girls had a more sustained increase in BMIz during early adolescence and reached a higher peak compared to higher-SES black girls and to white girls. Neighborhood income was associated with BMIz trajectory for black girls only. Unexpectedly, among black girls, living in higher-income neighborhoods was associated with higher overall levels of BMIz, controlling for SES. Our findings suggest that neighborhood socioeconomic characteristics may affect adolescent BMIz trajectories differently in different racial/ethnic groups.

The study of intergenerational mobility and most population research are governed by a two-generation (parent-to-offspring) view of intergenerational influence, to the neglect of the effects of grandparents and other ancestors and nonresident contemporary kin. While appropriate for some populations in some periods, this perspective may omit important sources of intergenerational continuity of family-based social inequality. Social institutions, which transcend individual lives, help support multigenerational influence, particularly at the extreme top and bottom of the social hierarchy, but to some extent in the middle as well. Multigenerational influence also works through demographic processes because families influence subsequent generations through differential fertility and survival, migration, and marriage patterns, as well as through direct transmission of socioeconomic rewards, statuses, and positions. Future research should attend more closely to multigenerational effects; to the tandem nature of demographic and socioeconomic reproduction; and to data, measures, and models that transcend co-resident nuclear families.

Although the quality of a child’s neighborhood can fluctuate because of either his own migration or the movement of those around him, these two processes do not necessarily influence children in the same way. Identifying the independent influence of each, if it exists, is an important step toward fully understanding how much and how characteristics of neighborhoods influence children. Using data from the Child Development Supplement of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, we develop a method for separating the effects of residential mobility and neighborhood change on children’s well-being, and report the results of an analysis using that method. Small amounts of change in a five-year window prevent the identification of potentially striking variation in the effects of different compositional changes within and across children's neighborhoods. Nonetheless, our results suggest differences in the influence of compositional change depending on whether it occurs within or across neighborhoods. The data permit demonstration of the utility of the method and allow us to uncover findings that suggest the importance of separately considering the sources of variation in children's neighborhoods. This research will inform studies using data over a longer period of time, which will soon be available. In addition, although we focus on the case of the neighborhood, the method used here may serve as a useful starting point for separating components of temporal processes in other settings.

Using data from the 2000 U.S. and Mexican Censuses, this paper examines the relationship between migration and marriage patterns by describing how the distributions of marital statuses and assortative mating patterns vary by individual and community experiences of migration. In Mexico, migrants and those living in areas with high levels of migration are less likely to marry a spouse with the same level of education. Return migrants from the U.S. to Mexico may use their improved economic position to marry up. In the U.S., Mexican migrants are also less likely to enter into homogamous unions; however, the odds of homogamy do not vary by couple level of migration. Migrants may expand their pool of potential spouses to include non-migrants and nonmigrants tend to be better educated than Mexican migrants. With individual migration experiences, the odds of marrying outside of one’s education group increase the most among the least educated. With community level of migration in Mexico, the odds of marrying outside of the group increases the most among the best educated. These findings suggest that preferences for homogamy are disrupted by migration.

The demographic behaviors of one generation, including marriage, divorce, fertility, and survival, create the population of families in which the next generation of children is raised. Assortative mating between men and women with varying socioeconomic characteristics is a key mechanism in establishing the families of the next generation, but differential fertility, child and parent survival, marital disruption, and parents' socioeconomic mobility modify these marriage patterns. This article examines the demographic mechanisms through which family backgrounds are created. It presents the mathematical links between marriage patterns and the joint distribution of parents' characteristics when their children are born and later in their lives. It illustrates these relationships using data on educational assortative mating, fertility, mortality, and the living arrangements of families in the United States. Although the educational attainments of husbands and wives are strongly associated, patterns of differential fertility reinforce this relationship, resulting in an even strong association between the educational attainments of mothers and fathers.

This paper examines the relationships between the residential choices of individuals and aggregate patterns of neighborhood change. We investigate the conditions under which individuals’ preferences for the race-ethnic composition of their neighborhoods produce high levels of segregation. Using computational models, we find that high levels of segregation occur only when individuals’ preferences follow a threshold function. If individuals make finer-grained distinctions among neighborhoods that vary in racial composition, preferences alone do not lead to segregation. Vignette data from the Detroit Area Study and the Multi-City Study of Urban Inequality indicate that individuals respond in a continuous way to variations in the racial makeup of neighborhoods rather than to a threshold. Our findings suggest that race preferences alone are insufficient to account for the high levels of segregation observed in American cities.

We use data from Indonesia and a demographic modeling strategy to estimate the total effect of increasing women’s schooling for the schooling of the next generation. This approach differs from standard approaches in that we include an estimate of how changes in women’s schooling affect children’s schooling not only directly but also through women’s choice of mate, marriage timing, fertility timing, fertility levels and the mortality of women and children. Each of these demographic factors can affect the relative number of children who will achieve different levels of schooling in the subsequent generation as a result of increasing women’s schooling in the previous generation. Some mechanisms, such as assortative mating, have very strong positive effects while others, such as marriage timing and fertility levels have offsetting effects. Differential mortality has a positive effect. Our results also demonstrate that the effects of expansions in women’s schooling depend on both the starting distribution of women’s schooling and where in the distribution women’s schooling increases.

The effect of the socioeconomic characteristics in one generation on the socioeconomic achievement of the next generation is the central concern of social stratification research. Researchers typically address this issue by analyzing the associations between the characteristics of parents and offspring. This approach, however, focuses on observed parent-offspring pairs and ignores that changes in the socioeconomic characteristics of one generation may alter the numbers and types of intergenerational family relationships that are created in the next one. Models of intergenerational effects that include marriage and fertility, as well as the intergenerational transmission of socioeconomic status, yield a richer account of intergenerational effects at both the family and population levels. When applied to a large sample of Indonesian women and their families, these models show that the effects of women’s educational attainment on the educational attainments of the next generation are positive. However, the beneficial effects of increases in women’s schooling on the educational attainment of their children are partially offset at the population level by a reduction in the overall number of children that a more educated population of women bears and enhanced by the more favorable marriage partners of better educated women.

Despite the abundance of research on neighborhoods' effects on children, most studies of neighborhood effects are cross-sectional, rendering them unable to depict the dynamic nature of social life, and obscuring important aspects of neighborhood processes and outcomes. This study uses residential histories from the Los Angeles Family and Neighborhood Survey to explore two questions: 1) How much do residential mobility and neighborhood change contribute to the overall variation in children’s neighborhood experience? 2) Does measuring neighborhood factors at more than one point in time matter for estimates of neighborhood effects? Results show that having information on residential mobility and neighborhood change over a two-year period does not greatly alter estimates of children’s neighborhood experiences. For blacks, however, residential mobility appears to cause economic heterogeneity in neighborhood poverty over time. Regarding neighborhood effects, considering residential mobility and neighborhood change does not change estimates significantly; for both unchanging and variable measurements of neighborhood experience, living in a high-poverty neighborhood has small but significant adverse effects on children's behavioral and academic well being. Despite the similarities between cross-sectional and longitudinal measurements, the results highlight variation between racial groups in their neighborhood experience, as well as the influence of both past and current neighborhood experience on children’s well being.

This study investigates trends in the interdependence of poverty and family structure from one generation to the next, focusing specifically on mothers and daughters. This aspect of the mobility process has not been explored, despite widespread concern about the life chances of children in poor single-parent families and dramatic changes in the distributions of poverty and family structure in recent decades. We examine origin-by-destination status along the two dimensions of poverty and family structure, using rich panel data and loglinear models to parse out the associations between poverty and family structure within and across generations. Our results show that the intergenerational associations between poverty and family structure are strong, but operate through largely independent pathways. Net of the correlation between poverty and family structure within a generation, the intergenerational transmission of poverty is significantly stronger than the intergenerational transmission of family structure, and neither childhood poverty nor family structure affects the other in adulthood. Finally, despite important changes in the distributions of poverty and family structure, we find no evidence of change in the processes of intergenerational inheritance over time.

This paper reports an analysis of the effects of parents' educational attainments on the attainments of their offspring, focusing on the effects of parents' school transitions. We test the hypothesis that whether offspring make a given school transition depends critically on whether their mothers and fathers have made that same transition. Using data for Taiwan and the United States, we show substantial effects of parents' transitions on offspring's transitions, even when overall levels of parents' schooling are controlled. We also examine variations in the effects of mother's and father's schooling on sons and daughters and interaction effects between parents' transitions and family size. In the United States, the effect of parents' transitions is large, pervasive and independent of the sex of parent, sex of offspring, and family resource constraints. In Taiwan this effect is mainly confined to the school attainments of fathers and its benefit goes mainly to sons. These results suggest that the presence or absence of the effects of whether parents make school transitions can provide concrete clues about variations in how educational stratification works.

We examine changes in educational homogamy across one cohort’s life and identify the demographic sources of these changes. Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, we decompose changes in the odds of homogamy in prevailing marriages into three components: changes due to (1) new marriages, (2) marital dissolutions, and (3) educational upgrades after marriage. The odds of homogamy increase substantially as the cohort ages. These patterns are primarily driven by changes in the odds of homogamy among newlyweds entering their first marriages. Marital dissolutions, educational upgrades after marriage, and remarriages have smaller effects.

A substantial body of research demonstrates links between poverty and family structure from one generation to the next, but leaves open key questions about the implications of these associations for aggregate-level change. To what extent does intergenerational inheritance affect trends in poverty and single parenthood over time? This paper examines how patterns of intergenerational inheritance play out in the population over the long run, using data from the National Longitudinal Surveys and a model of population renewal that takes into account intergenerational mobility and differential fertility across groups defined by poverty status and family structure. We find that recent patterns of intergenerational inheritance are contributing to growth in poverty and single parenthood, but their contribution is modest, falling well short of recent historical change and having little effect on the relative economic positions of single-parent and two-parent families.

This paper is concerned with stability and change in neighborhoods in large metropolitan areas. During the past 20 years, economic inequality among neighborhoods has grown and may be a source of widening inequality in other realms as well (e.g., Reich 1991; Jargowsky 1996). Numerous studies have focused on the possible effects of residential neighborhoods on a variety of social and economic outcomes (e.g., Brewster 1994; Brooks-Gunn, Duncan, and Aber 1997). Likewise, persistent residential segregation among racial and ethnic groups is implicated in enduring racial and ethnic inequality (e.g., Massey and Denton 1993). Yet our understanding of the dynamics of how neighborhoods are formed and how they change remains limited. A long tradition of research has documented trends in economic and racial segregation in American cities, relying on cross section census data (e.g., Duncan and Duncan 1957, Taeuber and Taeuber, Frey and Farley 1996, Massey and Denton 1993, Jargowsky 1996; 1997). While descriptively valuable, these studies have not revealed the causal mechanisms behind neighborhood change. Inasmuch as change occurs through residential and socioeconomic mobility, a dynamic approach is required. More recently, others have examined survey data on residential preferences in an effort to understand the attitudinal underpinnings of residential segregation (e.g., Farley, Fielding, and Krysan 1997; Frey and Farley 1996; Charles 2000). The rationale for these studies is that segregation is, at root, the result of individual choices about where to live which are determined in part by individuals' attitudes and preferences about the characteristics of neighborhoods. Although these studies are informative, lacking a model of how individual attitudes lead to residential mobility and how mobility leads to neighborhood change, they provide limited insight into how change occurs. As Schelling (1971; 1972) observed 30 years ago, the dynamic links between individual preferences and residential segregation are by no means intuitive. Another promising line of research has been to use panel survey data on geographic mobility to measure mobility among neighborhoods of varying economic and racial composition (e.g., Gramlich, Laren, and Sealand 1992; Massey, Gross, and Shibuya 1993; Quillian 1999a; 1999b). While providing valuable information on patterns of neighborhood turnover, this work has not yet yielded plausible models of neighborhood dynamics. The neighborhood changes implied by the turnover rates estimated in these studies are unrealistic because they assume fixed mobility rates across neighborhood types. This assumption is unsatisfactory because it ignores a crucial feature of residential mobility, namely that changes in the characteristics of neighborhoods bring about changes in rates of movement in and out of these neighborhoods. In sum, the study of residential segregation and inequality remains a lively area of research in which many of the core analytic issues are unresolved.

How much husbands and wives resemble each other on socioeconomic status and other social traits has long been a concern for demographers and students of social stratification. For demography, assortative mating patterns govern the social makeup of marriages and families. For stratification, spousal resemblance is an indicator of openness or closure of the social order. When people tend to marry within their own social stratum, populations and societies are more closed when they commonly marry members of other socioeconomic groups. But more that just an indicator of family structure and social differentiation, assortative mating is also a part of the dynamic process by which populations and social hierarchies reproduce. The formation and persistence of marriages affects levels and patterns of fertility and thus population growth rates and age structures. The kinds of marriages that form between persons of varying social characteristics determine the "family backgrounds" for their offspring and thus affect the social characteristics of the next generation. At the family and individual levels, mothers and fathers affect the eventual social standing of their children. At the population and cohort levels, the joint distribution of parents' characteristics affect the level and distribution of offsprings' characteristics. Assortative mating, in short, is a key step in the reproduction of populations and social hierarchies from generation to generation and from one period to the next.

Most intergenerational social mobility studies are based upon retrospective data, in which samples of individuals report socioeconomic information about their parents, an approach that provides representative data for offspring but not the parental generation. When available, prospective data on intergenerational mobility, which are based on a sample of respondents who report on their progeny, have conceptual and practical advantages. Prospective data are especially useful for studying social mobility across more than two generations and for developing joint models of social mobility and demographic processes. Because prospective data remain relatively scarce, we propose a method that corrects retrospective mobility data for the unrepresentativeness of the parental generation and thus permits them to be used for models of social mobility and demographic processes. We illustrate this method using both simulated data and data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. In our examples, this method removes more than 95 percent of the bias in the retrospective data.