Search Results
Title: Socioeconomic Mobility and Reproductive Outcomes Among African American and White Women in the United States
Resulting in 1 citation.
| 1. |
Colen, Cynthia G. |
|
Socioeconomic Mobility and Reproductive Outcomes Among African American and White Women in the United States Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Michigan, 2005. DAI-B 66/02, p. 843, Aug 2005 Cohort(s): NLSY79 Publisher: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses (PQDT) Keyword(s): Birthweight; Black Studies; Census of Population; Childbearing; Children, Well-Being; Family Income; Income Level; Infants; Mobility, Economic; Mobility, Social; Poverty; Racial Differences; Socioeconomic Factors; Women Permission to reprint the abstract has not been received from the publisher. This dissertation examines the extent to which African American and White women in the United States who have experienced upward socioeconomic mobility are able to translate their achieved social class status into favorable maternal and infant health outcomes. It is comprised of three essays, each designed to investigate how changes in lifetime maternal socioeconomic position impact infant wellbeing. In Chapter 2, I argue that upwardly mobile Black women will face similar risks of giving birth to a low birthweight baby compared to chronically poor Black women due to three overarching factors: (1) pervasive structural-level racial inequalities; (2) individual-level responses to race-based discrimination; and (3) delayed childbearing. In Chapter 3, I employ data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 and the 1970 U.S. Census of Population and Housing to estimate the likelihood that African American and White women who were raised in or near poverty but achieved middle-class status in adulthood will give birth to a low birthweight baby. Results from a series of logistic regression analyses illustrate that for White women who grew up in families with limited financial resources, increases in family income during adulthood are associated with a lower probability of giving birth to a low birthweight baby. However, for their African American counterparts, the relationship between adult socioeconomic position and the risk of low birthweight, although also negative, is substantially weaker and fails to reach statistical significance. In Chapter 4, I utilize birth certificate and census data from a thirty-year time period, in order to estimate the extent to which Black and White women aged 10 to 29 alter the timing of their first and second births in response to fluctuating job availability. Results from fixed-effect Poisson regression models suggest that during the 1990s--a decade of considerable economic growth--young African American women, especially those aged 18 to 19, were likely to postpone childbearing in order to take advantage of improved occupational opportunities. Furthermore, the association between employment possibilities and age-, race-, and state-specific rates of first and second births cannot be explained by concurrent changes in welfare policy, incarceration rates, or abortion availability. |
|
|
Bibliography Citation
Colen, Cynthia G. Socioeconomic Mobility and Reproductive Outcomes Among African American and White Women in the United States. Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Michigan, 2005. DAI-B 66/02, p. 843, Aug 2005. |