Life course transitions in early adulthood and SES disparities in tobacco use
Section snippets
Life course changes and smoking
The life course perspective offers two insightful themes concerning age-based trajectories of social behavior. On one hand, childhood conditions and experiences have enduring influences on adult conditions and experiences, thus creating some coherency and meaning in the life course (Elder, 1974). In specifying the nature of these linkages, theories of cumulative advantage argue that favorable conditions during childhood become a resource leading to future gains. The steady, incremental
Achieved socioeconomic status and smoking
The first major pathway through which SES in the family of origin can shape smoking trajectories during the transition to adulthood is achieved SES. During young adulthood, achieved SES grows in importance relative to ascribed family background during young adulthood (Pampel, 2008, Yang et al., 2008). While income and wealth often change substantially throughout adulthood, most Americans’ educational attainment is set by their mid- to late twenties (Stoops, 2003), and, although often not yet
Adult roles and smoking
The second pathway through which ascribed SES may shape smoking trajectories in the transition to adulthood relates to the nature and timing of transitions to adult roles. The human life course can be understood as a series of phases that bring new roles and norms (Elder, 1994). The transitions to adult roles of individuals from lower-SES backgrounds differ in two ways from those of their higher-SES counterparts. First, the nature of the adult roles tends to differ in ways that reflect social
Hypotheses
These arguments about the pathways through which ascribed SES shapes smoking trajectories during the transition to adulthood lead to three sets of predictions. First, descriptively, age trajectories in smoking should differ by parental socioeconomic background, with the disparities increasing over the transition to adulthood. Second, achieved SES and new adult roles should reduce smoking, except when the roles are assumed early in the life course or out of the normatively prescribed order. This
Data
The wide use and familiarity of the longitudinal Add Health data to most researchers testify to its value. The survey data cover a nationally representative sample at four time points (1994/1995, 1996, 2001, 2007/2008) and for ages from 11–17 (Wave 1) to 26–34 (Wave 4). With a cluster design that samples students within 132 randomly selected middle and high schools and oversamples minority youth, Add Health contains at-home interviews of 20,745 students at Wave 1 and 15,701 at Wave 4 (Add
Results
Table 1 lists descriptive statistics for the model variables, both pooled across waves and separately by wave. On average, about 34% of the sample smoked in the last month, and the average rises over time across all waves, except in Wave 3 (which may be underestimated slightly because of a different form of the smoking question). However, to describe the trajectories correctly, smoking should be matched to age rather than to wave.
As shown by statistics for the background variables, the sample
Discussion
Our analysis of life course changes in smoking produces three sets of findings corresponding to each of the hypotheses. First, differences in smoking disparities by parents’ education start small in adolescence but widen in young adulthood, thus contributing to SES disparities among adults. Others have found such a pattern (Lacey et al., 2010, Yang et al., 2008), but description of smoking trajectories from adolescence to young adulthood with high quality national longitudinal data up to age 34
Acknowledgments
This project received funding and administrative support from the University of Colorado Population Center, which is funded by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (Grant NICHD R21 HD051146). It uses data from Add Health, a program project directed by Kathleen Mullan Harris and designed by J. Richard Udry, Peter S. Bearman, and Kathleen Mullan Harris at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and funded by Grant P01-HD31921 from the Eunice
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2022, SSM - Population HealthCitation Excerpt :Smoking prevalence and initiation age are somewhat similar for adolescent girls and boys, yet girls are less likely to smoke heavily but also progress faster from their first cigarette to daily smoking (Fulkerson & French, 2003; Thorner et al., 2007). The gender gap grows with age, and by young adulthood, smoking prevalence is substantially higher for men (see Lawrence et al., 2014; Pampel, 2008; Pampel et al., 2014). Little research examines smoking in early middle adulthood across the intersection of race/ethnicity and gender.