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Title: A Cohort Comparison of the Transition to Adulthood in the United States
Resulting in 1 citation.
1. Jang, Bohyun
A Cohort Comparison of the Transition to Adulthood in the United States
Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Human Ecology, The Ohio State University, 2014
Cohort(s): NLSY79, NLSY97
Publisher: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses (PQDT)
Keyword(s): Geocoded Data; Life Course; Modeling, Latent Class Analysis/Latent Transition Analysis; Transition, Adulthood

Permission to reprint the abstract has not been received from the publisher.

I use data from the public and geocode files from both the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 (NLSY79) and the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 (NLSY97) to examine the transition to adulthood and compare it across cohorts. These data are well suited for this dissertation because both contain a wide range of life course information, and respondents from each dataset have undergone the same developmental stages at different historical times (i.e. their 20s during 1980s and in the 2000s for the NLSY79 and 97 respectively).

This dissertation is separated into three independent studies; first, in chapter 2, I use Latent Class Analysis to investigate distinct patterns in the transition to adulthood for men and women. Results show that young adults in the NLSY97 are more disproportionately distributed to different classes, which indicates their diverse paths to adulthood compared to those of the NLSY79. In the following chapter, I examine the complexity of life course transitions by focusing on mobility and union formation. Findings reveal that life course events are closely related to each other but the relationship differs by cohort, pointing to contextual influence on young adults' life courses. As a decision on the life course is likely made in concert with other life events, chapter 4 examines endogeneity between life course transitions. I find that unobserved characteristics affect the estimation of life course events in both cohorts, and therefore ignoring the factors could misrepresent the actual relationship between life events. From these findings, I address implications of theory, methodology, and social policy for those in the transition to adulthood in chapter 5.

Bibliography Citation
Jang, Bohyun. A Cohort Comparison of the Transition to Adulthood in the United States. Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Human Ecology, The Ohio State University, 2014.