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Multiple-Partner Fertility and Cohort Change in the Prevalence of Half-Siblings

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Demography

Abstract

The transformation of the American family under the second demographic transition has created more opportunities for parents to have children with multiple partners, but data limitations have hampered prevalence estimates of multiple-partner fertility from the perspective of children. This study uses nationally representative data from the 1979 and 1997 cohorts of the National Longitudinal Surveys of Youth to examine cohort change in children’s exposure to multiple-partner fertility. We find that one in five children in the 1979 cohort had at least one half-sibling by their 18th birthday, and the prevalence grew to more than one in four children by the 1997 cohort. A strong educational gradient in exposure to half-siblings persists across both cohorts, but large racial/ethnic disparities have narrowed over time. Using demographic decomposition techniques, we find that change in the racial/ethnic and socioeconomic composition of the U.S. population cannot explain the growth in exposure to half-siblings. We conclude by discussing the shifting patterns of fertility and family formation associated with sibling complexity and considering the implications for child development and social stratification.

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Notes

  1. Unlike previous studies that estimated NLSY respondents’ multiple-partner fertility when they are adults (Dorius 2012; Scott et al. 2013), our estimates refer to respondents’ exposure to half-siblings and therefore to their parents’ multiple-partner fertility.

  2. We include mothers’ characteristics only as covariates in our models because of the greater amount of missing data on fathers’ characteristics (ranging from 8 % to 40 % of cases missing) and the generally strong correlations between observed mothers’ and fathers’ characteristics.

  3. See https://www.nlsinfo.org/weights.

  4. Our ability to measure the presence of siblings depends on the participant youth considering someone a sibling. Nonresident siblings may be more likely to be left out of these accounts.

  5. In the hot deck method, data are imputed through matching. First, NLSY97 respondents are grouped based on their similarity on observed characteristics for which data are not missing (race and education). Second, imputed values on the sibling measures are obtained as a random sample from the nonmissing values within the race/education group in which a given missing data case belongs.

  6. In exploratory models, we tested the interactions between mother’s level of education and child’s race. Including this interaction did not change the coefficients on the cohort variables. For this reason, we do not include interactions in the final models, following Hayford (2013).

  7. Fairlie (1999, 2005) proposed an alternative and popular decomposition technique of nonlinear models. Robustness checks using Fairlie’s technique (available upon request) lead to the same conclusions.

  8. We include a group indicator in the pooled models as an additional covariate (for details, see Jann 2008).

  9. The contribution of categorical variables for subpopulations’ risks depends on the reference group chosen. Normalized regressions compute the coefficients for each category without altering the contribution of continuous variables to the coefficient effects.

  10. Discrepancies for mothers’ education may result from our inability to capture nonresident mothers in the census.

  11. Children of mothers with only one child can still have a half-sibling on the father’s side.

  12. Estimates of the prevalence of sibling complexity in Table 7 (26 % and 20.2 %) are slightly different than the ones presented in Table 2 (25.5 % and 20.4 %). This difference results from the exclusion of youth of “other race” from the decomposition analysis.

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Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Kelly Musick, Vida Maralani, Megan Sweeney, Elizabeth Wildsmith, and anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful feedback on earlier versions of this article. This work was supported by the William T. Grant Foundation.

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  1. Department of Sociology, Washington State University, 204 Wilson-Short Hall, Pullman, WA, 99164, USA

    Mariana Amorim

  2. Policy Analysis and Management, Cornell University, 2301 Martha Van Rensselaer Hall, Ithaca, NY, 14953, USA

    Laura M. Tach

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  1. Mariana Amorim
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Amorim, M., Tach, L.M. Multiple-Partner Fertility and Cohort Change in the Prevalence of Half-Siblings. Demography 56, 2033–2061 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13524-019-00820-3

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