Race/Ethnicity, Attitudes, and Living With Parents During Young Adulthood

Non-White young adults are more likely to live with their parents throughout their 20s, more likely to return home after going away to college, and less likely to leave again after returning. Scholars have speculated that subcultural differences in attitudes toward marriage and family play a key role in generating racial/ethnic differences in rates of coresidence with parents among young adults. Data from the National Education Longitudinal Survey of 1988 (N = 11,228) were analyzed in order to test this hypothesis. Attitudes toward marriage and family were significantly associated with coresidence, especially among young men, but did not substantially account for racial/ethnic differences in living arrangements. Among young non-White women and young Black men, higher rates of coresidence were related to differences from Whites in socioeconomic or marital status (and sometimes both) that were largely independent of differences in attitudes toward marriage and family.Key Words: coresidence, culture/race/ethnicity, housing, immigration/migrant families, intergenerational relations. National Educational Longitudinal Study.A substantial number of young adults live with at least one of their parents. At least 10% of 25- to 34-year-olds, over 3.9 million individuals, lived with a parent or guardian in each year from 1983 through 2011 (U.S. Census Bureau, 2011). But coresidence rates vary substantially by racial/ethnic background. Asians, Blacks, and Hispanics are significantly more likely to live in their parents' homes than comparable non-Hispanic White adults (Kreider, 2007). Given the well-known socioeconomic inequalities across racial/ethnic groups in the United States, these differences may be related to how coresidence sometimes serves as a private safety net, reducing per-person housing costs and facilitating resource sharing across generations (F. Goldscheider, 1997; Newman, 2012).Yet some scholars have also suggested that racial/ethnic differences may reflect pan-ethnic subcultures that shape young people's attitudes toward marriage and family (Burr & Mutchler, 1999; Fuligni & Pedersen, 2002; F. Goldscheider & Goldscheider, 1999; Rumbaut & Komaie, 2010). Attitudes toward and expectations about marriage, family, and living arrangements vary significantly by race/ethnicity during both adolescence and young adulthood (Crissey, 2005; Fuligni, Tseng, & Lam, 1999; Harris & Lee, 2006; South, 1993). Moreover, attitudes are associated with actual living arrangements, at least among recent high school graduates, the elderly, and Black and White men (Burr & Mutchler; Fuligni & Pedersen; Sarkisian, 2007).Whether attitudes toward marriage and family are associated with rates of coresidence with parents among young adults in their mid- to late 20s remains unknown. Despite a large literature examining attitudes toward living arrangements during young adulthood (Alwin, 1996; Fuligni et ah, 1999; C. Goldscheider & Goldscheider, 1988; F. Goldscheider & Lawton, 1998), few existing studies have examined whether these attitudes actually predict whether young adults live in a parent's household, much less whether they can account for racial/ethnic differences in rates of coresidence (but see Fuligni & Pedersen, 2002). Moreover, no existing study has done so using nationally representative, longitudinal data on Asian, Black, Flispanic, and White young adults in the United States.With these observations in mind, this article poses the following questions: What predicts whether young adults live with their parents? In particular, to what extent are young people's attitudes toward marriage and family associated with coresidence during young adulthood, and to what extent can individual variation in such attitudes account for racial/ethnic differences in rates of coresidence? To answer these questions, I analyzed data on Asian, Black, Hispanic, and White young adults from the restricted-use version of the National Education Longitudinal Study, which tracked a representative sample of the eighth-grade class of 1988 through 2000. …