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Duration and Timing of Exposure to Neighborhood Poverty and the Risk of Adolescent Parenthood

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Demography

Abstract

Theory suggests that the impact of neighborhood poverty depends on both the duration and timing of exposure. Previous research, however, has not properly analyzed the sequence of neighborhoods to which children are exposed throughout the early life course. This study investigates the effects of different longitudinal patterns of exposure to disadvantaged neighborhoods on the risk of adolescent parenthood. It follows a cohort of children in the PSID from age 4 to 19 and uses novel methods for time-varying exposures that overcome critical limitations of conventional regression when selection processes are dynamic. Results indicate that sustained exposure to poor neighborhoods substantially increases the risk of becoming a teen parent and that exposure to neighborhood poverty during adolescence may be more consequential than exposure earlier during childhood.

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Notes

  1. Childbearing data for males are likely of poorer quality than those for females. In general, evidence indicates that males are simply not as accurate as females in their fertility reporting (Nock 1998; Vere 2008).

  2. This study analyzes the risk of both marital and nonmarital adolescent parenthood. Parallel analyses of neighborhood effects on only nonmarital adolescent parenthood yield findings nearly identical to those reported here.

  3. The family head is the person with primary financial responsibility for the family and must be at least 16 years old, unless this person is female and lives with a husband, in which case the husband is designated as family head.

  4. Neighborhood effect estimates reported in this article are combined estimates from the five multiple imputation data sets. For simplicity, descriptive statistics are based on only the first imputed data set. A small number of subjects who remained in the PSID through adolescence but are missing childbirth history information are treated as though they left the study at age 11 and are incorporated into the adjustment for censoring.

  5. Neighborhood poverty at baseline, A 0, is not used to estimate causal effects because the covariate data needed to model selection into treatment at this time point are not available. Instead, this measure is treated as a confounder for the effects of later treatments and absorbed into the vector of baseline controls.

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Acknowledgements

A previous version of this paper was presented at the 2011 Population Association of America Annual Conference in Washington, DC. The author would like to thank David Harding, Felix Elwert, Yu Xie, Jeff Morenoff, participants in the University of Michigan Demography Workshop, and several anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on earlier versions of the study. This research was supported by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship under Grant No. DGE 0718128 and by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development under Grant Nos. T32 HD007339 and R24 HD041028 to the Population Studies Center at the University of Michigan.

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  1. Population Studies Center, Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan, 426 Thompson Street, Ann Arbor, MI, 48106, USA

    Geoffrey T. Wodtke

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Correspondence to Geoffrey T. Wodtke.

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Wodtke, G.T. Duration and Timing of Exposure to Neighborhood Poverty and the Risk of Adolescent Parenthood. Demography 50, 1765–1788 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13524-013-0219-z

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