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Origins and Destinations, but How Much and When? Educational Disparities in Smoking and Drinking Across Adolescence and Young Adulthood

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Abstract

Educational inequalities in health behaviors change dynamically across the life course. Yet, how parental and personal education interactively shape age-specific behavioral inequalities across the transition to adulthood has yet to be understood. Drawing on national Add Health data (N = 12,605; 6,675 women and 5,930 men), we analyze age- and gender-specific trajectories of current smoking and binge drinking from adolescence to young adulthood. In line with previous work, we find that parental education associates with smoking and drinking disparities even after respondents’ own education is completed. Reciprocally, we also find that disparities by eventual educational attainment appear early. During the college years, higher parental education predicts higher—not lower—rates of binge drinking. We find that attaining higher education “against the odds” of an educationally disadvantaged family background circumscribes the lowest rates of smoking and drinking for men and women alike, and especially during the college years, while “falling from grace” by not attaining higher education at levels matching one’s parents predicts the highest levels of smoking and drinking for both genders during or after college. These results shed new light on the interactive socioeconomic processes that help to explain behavioral health gradients across adolescence and adulthood.

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Acknowledgements

This research uses data from Add Health. Add Health is directed by Robert A. Hummer and funded by the National Institute on Aging cooperative agreements U01 AG071448 (Hummer) and U01 AG071450 (Aiello and Hummer) at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Waves I-V data are from the Add Health Program Project, grant P01 HD31921 (Harris) from Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), with cooperative funding from 23 other federal agencies and foundations. Add Health was designed by J. Richard Udry, Peter S. Bearman, and Kathleen Mullan Harris at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Thanks to Elizabeth Lawrence and Shawn Bauldry for their insightful feedback. We presented an earlier version of this paper at the 2019 Meeting of the Population Association of America (held in Austin, TX).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Health and Society Program, Department of Sociology, Baylor University, One Bear Place, Campus Box #97326, Waco, TX, 76798-7326, USA

    Matthew A. Andersson

  2. Department of Sociology, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA

    Vida Maralani

  3. Human Flourishing Program, Institute for Quantitative Social Science, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA

    Renae Wilkinson

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Appendix

Appendix

See Tables 7–10

Table 7 Estimates for multilevel logistic regression models of current smoking, women (N person = 6,675; N person time = 24,008)
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Table 8 Estimates for multilevel logistic regression models of current smoking, men (N person = 5,930; N person time = 20,963)
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Table 9 Estimates for multilevel logistic regression models of binge drinking, women (N person = 6,675; N person time = 23,595)
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Table 10 Estimates for multilevel logistic regression models of binge drinking, men (N person = 5,930; N person time = 20,690)
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Andersson, M.A., Maralani, V. & Wilkinson, R. Origins and Destinations, but How Much and When? Educational Disparities in Smoking and Drinking Across Adolescence and Young Adulthood. Popul Res Policy Rev 41, 521–558 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11113-021-09659-2

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