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Paternity Establishment for Men’s Nonmarital Births

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Abstract

This paper uses the 2002 National Survey of Family Growth to examine paternity establishment among men’s nonmarital births. Using births as the unit of analysis, I find that paternity establishment for first births (n = 661) is linked to race/ethnicity and relationship status at birth, and these characteristics are associated differently with the timing and location of paternity establishment (in-hospital or at some later point). For higher-parity births (n = 429), paternity establishment for a particular birth is strongly related to prior paternity and fertility behaviors. Paternity is less likely to be established for a higher-parity birth if the father failed to establish paternity for at least one earlier birth, and third or higher-parity births are far more likely to have paternity established at a subsequent point than at the hospital.

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Notes

  1. The sample was designed to interview more women (approximately 7,500) than men (approximately 4,800) (Groves et al. 2005). The response rate for men was 78%, on par with the response rate for women (80%).

  2. There were too few men in the “other” category to create a separate category.

  3. The paternity establishment percentage here (90%) is higher than those discussed in the Data section of the paper. The analytical data include births from 1984 to 2002 and include both in-hospital and subsequent paternity establishment, whereas the figures in the Data section were limited to in-hospital paternity establishment and only those years for which external data on paternity establishment was available (generally 1997–2000).

  4. This not included in the final model because the interaction between parity and children with other partners was somewhat sensitive to specification and was quite large due to the relatively small number of parity-specific births with new partners.

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Acknowledgments

This paper was supported by a grant from The Horowitz Foundation for Social Policy. I thank the editor and reviewers for help and suggestion on earlier drafts.

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  1. Department of Anthropology & Sociology, Kutztown University, P.O. Box 730, Kutztown, PA, 19530, USA

    Karen Benjamin Guzzo

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Guzzo, K.B. Paternity Establishment for Men’s Nonmarital Births. Popul Res Policy Rev 28, 853–872 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11113-009-9131-z

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