Childhood origins of the three big themes
The three big themes were based on information about what the women in the study were doing in their 20s and 30s. The study lets us also go back further than that and look at their starting points just before young adulthood. Then we can connect the two, seeing how their childhood inheritances contributed to later outcomes.
To set this up, I did a factor analysis on various information relating to age 15 and before. This includes items regarding race, mother’s education level, mothers’ age when she had her first child, whether they lived with their biological father, family income, how often their parents attended religious services, their grades in middle- and high-school, their performance on a range of standardized tests, whether they were still in school at age 15, body mass index (BMI) at age 15, to what extent they were using alcohol and marijuana at age 15, the extent to which they were sexually active and had multiple partners around age 15, and number of children at age 15.
A factor analysis provided two factors that are very similar to two we saw in the women’s adult patterns. One involves Higher SES vs. Lower SES. The other involves Freewheelers vs. Ring-Bearers.
On the Higher SES side, these features were likely to be seen together: Better test performance, higher family income, mothers with more education, better grades, mothers who were older, biological fathers at home, not being Black or Hispanic, still being in school at age 15, being thinner at age 15, not having had children by age 15, and more alcohol/pot usage. On the Lower SES side, there tended to be a co-occurrence of the opposite features.
On the Freewheeler side, these features were likely to be seen together: more likely to be sexually active and to have had multiple partners at age 15, more alcohol/pot usage at age 15, lower rates of parental church attendance, less likely to still be in school at age 15, and worse grades. On the Ring-Bearer side it was the opposite of these features.
So how do these childhood factors predict outcomes in their 20s and 30s? The correlation between childhood SES and adult SES is .72, which is really big. It’s the equivalent of guessing a series of coin flips and getting it right 86% of the time. For these women, the overall shape of their adult SES was strongly constrained by what happened before their junior year of high school.
When looking at Freewheeler vs. Ring-Bearer factors from age 15 and from adulthood, there’s a solid relationship with a correlation of .35, but this is only about half as potent as the SES correlation. To make the same point another way: The correlation between their parents’ household income in 1997 and the women’s own household income at age 36 was .46. The correlation between their parents’ education levels and the women’s own education levels at age 36 was .43. But the correlation between parents’ rates of church attendance in 1997 and the women’s own rates of church attendance at age 36 was only .28.
Finally, there was a third factor in the adult data, namely, Sidelines vs. Stable Relationships. Not surprisingly, it’s not really related to the SES and Freewheeler/Ring-Bearer childhood factors. So what does it relate to? A big one is race. Black women can face unique constraints in forming longer-term relationships, given that there are substantially more living, non-incarcerated Black women in their 20s and 30s than living, non-incarcerated Black men in their 20s and 30s in the U.S. – the ratio is probably around 85 men for every 100 women.
The sex ratio imbalance contributes to tremendous racial differences in relationship patterns. For example, at age 36, while around 72% of the non-Black sample women were living with a male partner, for Black women it was only half that number – around 36%.
