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Social Status Attainment During the Transition to Adulthood

  • Empirical Research
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Abstract

The transition from adolescence to adulthood is a critical time for status attainment, with income, education, work experience, and independence from parents accruing at varying speeds and intensities. This study takes an intergenerational life-course perspective that incorporates parents’ and one’s own social status to examine the status attainment process from adolescence into adulthood in the domains of economic capital (e.g., income) and human capital (e.g., education, occupation). Survey data from three waves of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (analytic n = 8,977) are analyzed using latent class analysis to capture the ebb and flow of social status advantages and disadvantages from adolescence (Wave 1) through young adulthood (Wave 3) into adulthood (Wave 4). The analytic sample is composed of 50.3 % females and 70.2 % Whites, 15.3 % Blacks, 11.0 % Hispanics, and 3.5 % Asians ages 12–18 at Wave 1 and 25–31 at Wave 4. Four latent classes are found for economic capital and five for human capital. The importance of parents’ social status is demonstrated by the presence of large groups with persistently low and persistently high social status over time in both domains. The capacity of individuals to determine their own status, however, is shown by equally large groups with upward and downward mobility in both domains. These findings demonstrate the dynamic nature of social status during this critical developmental period.

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Acknowledgments

This research 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 Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, with cooperative funding from 23 other federal agencies and foundations. Special acknowledgment is due Ronald R. Rindfuss and Barbara Entwisle for assistance in the original design. Information on how to obtain the Add Health data files is available on the Add Health website (http://www.cpc.unc.edu/addhealth). No direct support was received from Grant P01-HD31921 for this analysis. A National Institute of Drug Abuse (NIDA) predoctoral fellowship (T32-DA007272-20) and National Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) postdoctoral fellowship (T32-AA0072-40) provided additional funding (to CKL) for this research. PJC was supported in part by the CDC Prevention Research Centers Program (U48 DP001934). SPW received partial support from the UCLA Resource Centers for Minority Aging Research Center for Health Improvement of Minority Elderly (RCMAR/CHIME) under National Institute of Aging (NIA) Grant P30-AG021684. The content of this article does not necessarily represent the official views of the NIDA, NIAAA, NIA or the NIH. CKL would like to thank Christine Grella and Chandra Ford for helpful comments with study conceptualization.

Conflict of interest

The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Author Contributions

CKL conceived of the present research questions, conducted the statistical analyses and drafted the manuscript; PJC obtained the data, made it available and contributed to the interpretation of the results and revisions of the text; SPW provided feedback on analyses and contributed to the interpretation of the results and; and CSA contributed to the interpretation of the results and revisions of the text. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

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Author notes

  1. Camillia K. Lui

    Present address: Alcohol Research Group and School of Public Health, University of California at Berkeley, 6475 Christie Avenue, Suite 400, Emeryville, CA, 94608-1010, USA

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Community Health Sciences, Jonathan and Karin Fielding School of Public Health, University of California at Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, USA

    Camillia K. Lui, Steven P. Wallace & Carol S. Aneshensel

  2. Department of Pediatrics, David Geffen School of Medicine at University of California at Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, USA

    Paul J. Chung

  3. Department of Health Policy and Management, Jonathan and Karin Fielding School of Public Health, University of California at Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, USA

    Paul J. Chung

  4. RAND Health, RAND Corporation, Santa Monica, CA, USA

    Paul J. Chung

  5. Children’s Discovery and Innovation Institute, Mattel Children’s Hospital UCLA, Los Angeles, CA, USA

    Paul J. Chung

  6. UCLA Center for Health Policy Research, Los Angeles, CA, USA

    Steven P. Wallace

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  1. Camillia K. Lui
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Correspondence to Camillia K. Lui.

Appendices

Appendix 1

See Table 6.

Table 6 Fit indices for latent class analyses of economic capital
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Appendix 2

See Table 7.

Table 7 Fit indices for latent class analyses of human capital
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Lui, C.K., Chung, P.J., Wallace, S.P. et al. Social Status Attainment During the Transition to Adulthood. J Youth Adolescence 43, 1134–1150 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10964-013-0030-6

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