Family Structure and Reproduction of Inequality: A Decomposition Approach
Working Paper 49
Download
Key Findings
- Young adults’ family structure experiences differ greatly by their parents’ socioeconomic status (as measured by parents’ level of education). Young adults from high-SES families are more likely to grow-up in an intact family than young adults from low-SES families. They are also less likely to grow-up with a single mother or to experience high amounts of family instability.
- Differences in children’s educational attainment by parents’ socioeconomic status are quite large. Children born to low-SES parents complete fewer years of schooling, and are less likely to graduate from high school or college, than their high-SES peers.
- Differences in family structure by parental education play a surprisingly small role in explaining SES disparities in youths’ educational attainment. Although the higher prevalence of non-intact families at the lower end of the socioeconomic distribution appears to be reducing the educational attainment of low-SES youth relative to that of their high-SES peers, the negative implications of growing-up in a non-intact family appear to be greater for youth at the higher end of the socioeconomic distribution.
Over the past 50 years, parents’ socioeconomic status (SES) has become more strongly correlated with the family arrangements in which children are raised, with children in higher-SES households more likely to be raised by both parents. This has generated concerns about the role of family structure in the reproduction of inequality. The present study uses data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 cohort to measure the extent to which young adults’ educational attainment is due to their parents’ education levels (a measure of SES) and differences in family structure by SES. Specifically, I use decomposition models to hypothetically assign low-SES youth (1) the same family structure composition as high-SES youth and (2) the same association between family structure and educational attainment as high-SES youth. This allows me to measure how much SES differences in young adults’ educational attainment are due to SES differences in family structure composition versus SES differences in the association between family structure and young adults’ attainment. The results suggest that family structure plays a surprisingly small role in explaining why children from higher-SES families obtain more years of education. This study adds new evidence to the ongoing debate on the importance of family structure for intergenerational economic mobility.
More like this from Mathematica
How do you apply evidence?
Take our quick four-question survey to help us curate evidence and insights that serve you.
Take our survey