# Presentation: 919952

## The Relationship Context of Early Fatherhood

- H. Elizabeth Peters and Kara Joyner
- Cornell University
- Kathryn Hynes
- Pennsylvania State University
- Special thanks to Child Trends, Felicia Yang Deleone, and Sue Eschleman for their help with fertility files. This research was supported by a grant from the NICHD (P01-HD045610).

**Notes:**
Research supported by funding from the NICHD.

Logo for broader program project.

Acknowledgement for help with fertility files.

## Emphasis of Studies on Early Transitions to Parenthood

- Exclusive focus on women
- Examination of factors associated with a premarital birth or teen birth
- Analysis of relationship context conditional on having a birth

**Notes:**
Focus on women. Handful of studies on male fertility, and they are focused on the quality of data.

Also emphasis on premarital births or pregnancies.

When they do focus on the relationship context– is it a single, cohabiting, or marital birth– they restrict their focus to women with a birth.

Also studies that focus on how chances of having a birth or pregnancy, conditional on being in a single, cohabiting, or married relationship.

## Unanswered Questions

- What factors increase chances of having an early single, cohabiting, or marital birth?
- Have the determinants changed over time?
- What are the patterns for men?

**Notes:**
Researchers have long focused on premarital childbearing because of its association with negative outcomes, and more recently they have suggested that these outcomes are due to selection. 

That is, girls from more disadvantaged backgrounds are more likely to have a premarital birth.

An important question is whether they are also more likely to have a cohabiting, single, or marital birth early.

We have only identified a couple of studies that look at whether the determinants of premarital childbearing differ across cohorts.

Why do we care about men? There are several reasons, but in terms of just this conference, we need to know about the selection of men into different types of fathering arrangements.

## Theoretical Framework

- Early births and their context are a reflection of opportunity costs and social norms.
- The opportunity costs of early parenthood may be smaller for men than for women.
- The effects of variables across different relationship contexts are indicative of whether cohabitation is an alternative to singlehood or marriage.

**Notes:**
For instance, the opportunity cost argument predicts that women from less educated backgrounds are more likely to have an early birth because they have less to lose from becoming a parent early. 

The social norms argument predicts that women who grew up in a single parent or step parent family are more likely to have a nonmarital birth because of the example their own mother sets.

The typical role of men if economic provider, rather than caregiver. Though Nock’s (1998) work suggests that early fatherhood had negative socioeconomic effects.

For instance, if cohabitation is an alternative to marriage, we would expect to see similar effects of a variable on cohabiting and marital births. Of course, there could be unobservables differentiating births across these contexts.

## Data and Periods of Collection 

- National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 (NLSY79): 1979 – 2002
- National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 (NLSY97): 1997 – 2002
- National Survey of Family Growth 2002 (NSFG): 2002

**Notes:**
Several data sets to test robustness of results. 

Two panels data sets comprised of two different birth cohorts.

NSFG is broader in terms of cohort representation but retrospective.

Vital statistics to evaluate the quality of male fertility reports.

## First Birth Hazards: NSFG Men and Women Born 75-84

**Notes:**
First birth hazards. What is a hazard. Higher overall rates for women than for men.

For the sake of time focus on NSFG. For precision look at later cohorts where nonmarital births are more common.

Here you can see how chances of having a specific type of birth differ by age for men and women. 

Interesting contrast for men and women. For women only hazards for marital births increase at later ages. For men all types of births increase at later ages. 

## Birth and Union Context Before 25, by Cohort: NSFG Men and Women

**Notes:**
Culmination of hazards. Those who made it to 25. 

Cohorts are clunky buy we see a fluctuation in having first birth consistent with previous studies that have looked at trends in the ASFRs in the teens in early twenties. Decrease in the seventies and then a very slight increase in the early nineties.

Decreasing marital births and increasing nonmarital births.

Cohabiting births an increasing share of single births. (See also Bumpass and Lu 2000).

Fewer births for men.

## Birth and Union Context Before 25, by Cohort and Race: NSFG Men

**Notes:**
Use whites as anchor to be consistent with later analyses.

Differences between whites and other groups is same over time.

## Birth and Union Context Before 25, by Race and Cohort: NSFG Women

**Notes:**
Patterns for women are pretty similar.

But still these racial differences are unadjusted for other factors.

## Competing Risk Models for Transitions to Single, Cohabiting, and Married Fatherhood

- Discrete-time multinomial logit models of outcomes between ages 15 and 24:
- No birth (reference group)
- Single birth
- Cohabiting birth
- Married birth
- Independent variables
- Age (yearly dummies), mother’s education, mother worked when respondent was age 14, race-ethnicity (white, black, Hispanic), foreign born, family structure at age 14 (2 bio parent, single parent, step-parent, other)

**Notes:**
Separate models for the different data sets.

Note that we cannot make as detailed contrasts in NSLY79, because in earlier years simply know cohabitational status at time of interview.

If behavior changes over time, we might expect results across data sets to differ because they include different cohorts of individuals. 

Therefore, we estimate separate regressions for NSFG respondents born during 1957-64 (the same years as the NLSY79) and those born during 1975-84 (which overlaps with NLSY97). 

Focus the results on men.

## Slide 11

**Notes:**
To help us understand the magnitude of these relationships, we convert the regression coefficients. These measure the change in the probability of a having given outcome– a marital, nonmarital, single, or cohabitational birth, relative to no birth for someone with a specific characteristic relative to someone with the default value of the characteristic. Here we graph the change in the marginal probability of a given outcome for a man who is black compared to one who is white.  The first four bars show these probabilities for marital births. (Point to the different date sets, and then to the different outcomes.) Stars versus a, b and c.

Black men from the NLSY79 and NLSY97 have a significantly lower marginal probability of having a marital birth than white men.  The marginal probability of this outcome is also negative but even smaller in magnitude in the NSFG. The probability of a non-marital birth is significantly larger for black men then for white men. The next set of bars shows that the results for non-marital births are mainly a reflection of having a single birth, as indicated by the larger bars for single births. Black men are also significantly more likely than white men to have single births in comparison to cohabiting births, except in the earlier NSFG cohort. 

Hispanic men have a greater marginal probability of a marital birth than white men, but the difference is either small or not significant.Hispanic men are significantly more likely than white men to have a non-marital birth, and they are significantly more likely to have a cohabiting and single birth. The effect of being Hispanic does not differ across birth contexts.

## Slide 12

## Slide 13

## Slide 14

## Conclusions

- Factors that increase chances of having an early nonmarital birth tend to increase chances of having a birth in any context, with some exceptions.
- Few factors significantly differentiate single, cohabiting, and marital births.
- Differences more pronounced for women than for men.

**Notes:**
Specifically, we find that being black, Hispanic, having a mother with lower education, and growing up in either a single parent or step-parent household is associated with a higher likelihood of having a nonmarital birth before age 24. 

However, blacks and respondents who grew up in a single parent household are not significantly more likely to have a marital birth. Consistent with perspectives that emphasize socialization processes.

Lack of significant differences in the effect of variables on having a birth across different contexts. One caveat to keep in mind is our sample sizes may be too small to detect differences when estimating separate coefficients for marital, cohabiting, and single births. 

We also find that the magnitudes of these associations are smaller for men than for women. Could be due to differences in opportunity costs or due to measurement error.

## Directions for Future Analyses

- Address differences in determinants of relationship context of birth by age and  race.
- Examine the influence of both partner’s characteristics on the relationship context of births.
- Consider measurement error in reports of cohabitation.
- Include time-varying covariates.