The Life Course Origins of the Immigrant Advantage? Parental Nativity, Parental Education, and Academic Achievement Gaps From Kindergarten to High School in the United States

2021 ◽  
pp. 019791832110415
Author(s):  
Tate Kihara
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
High School ◽  
Academic Achievement ◽  
Life Course ◽  
Test Score ◽  
Parental Education ◽  
The United States ◽  
Achievement Gaps ◽  
Immigrant Parents ◽  
The Life Course

In the United States, there is a wide academic achievement gap, beginning in early childhood, between children with more and less educated parents. However, we know little about the differences in size and trajectories of achievement gaps associated with parental education and nativity. Drawing on two US education datasets that enable me to follow a cohort of children from kindergarten to high school, I estimate the size and trajectories of standardized test-score gaps associated with parental education, separately for children of native-born and immigrant parents. I find that the test-score gap between children with more and less educated native-born parents stays wide and stable from kindergarten entry to high school. In contrast, the test-score gap between children with more and less educated immigrant parents is narrower in kindergarten because of higher achievement of children with less educated immigrant parents, compared to their counterparts with less educated native-born parents. Moreover, the gap between more and less educated immigrant parents further narrows in their early life course because the achievement of children with less educated immigrant parents improves relative to children with more educated immigrant parents. Differences by parental nativity in the size and trajectories of achievement gaps associated with parental education can be partially explained by the fact that children with less educated immigrant parents have relatively greater resources than their peers with less educated native-born parents from early in life. My findings provide evidence that the “immigrant advantage” in academic achievement, a common finding in the literature on immigrant education in the United States, originates early in the life course.

scholarly journals A Confluence of Policy Inequality: Health Disparities in Old Age Among American Indian and Alaska Native Populations

2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (Supplement_1) ◽  
pp. 37-37
Author(s):  
Sadie Giles
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Health Disparities ◽  
Life Course ◽  
American Indian ◽  
Old Age ◽  
Alaska Native ◽  
Political History ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Life Course

Abstract Racial health disparities in old age are well established, and new conceptualizations and methodologies continue to advance our understanding of health inequality across the life course. One group that is overlooked in many of these analyses, however, is the aging American Indian/Native Alaskan (AI/NA) population. While scholars have attended to the unique health inequities faced by the AI/NA population as a whole due to its discordant political history with the US government, little attention has been paid to unique patterns of disparity that might exist in old age. I propose to draw critical gerontology into the conversation in order to establish a framework through which we can uncover barriers to health, both from the political context of the AI/NA people as well as the political history of old age policy in the United States. Health disparities in old age are often described through a cumulative (dis)advantage framework that offers the benefit of appreciating that different groups enter old age with different resources and health statuses as a result of cumulative inequalities across the life course. Adding a framework of age relations, appreciating age as a system of inequality where people also gain or lose access to resources and status upon entering old age offers a path for understanding the intersection of race and old age. This paper will show how policy history for this group in particular as well as old age policy in the United States all create a unique and unequal circumstance for the aging AI/NA population.

scholarly journals Endogenous Selection Bias and Cumulative Inequality over the Life Course: Evidence from Educational Inequality in Subjective Well-Being

2020 ◽  
Vol 36 (3) ◽  
pp. 333-350
Author(s):  
Fabian Kratz ◽  
Alexander Patzina
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Panel Data ◽  
Life Course ◽  
Panel Study ◽  
Well Being ◽  
The United States ◽  
Subjective Well Being ◽  
Interviewer Effects ◽  
Endogenous Selection ◽  
The Life Course

Abstract According to theories of cumulative (dis-)advantage, inequality increases over the life course. Labour market research has seized this argument to explain the increasing economic inequality as people age. However, evidence for cumulative (dis-)advantage in subjective well-being remains ambiguous, and a prominent study from the United States has reported contradictory results. Here, we reconcile research on inequality in subjective well-being with theories of cumulative (dis-)advantage. We argue that the age-specific endogenous selection of the (survey) population results in decreasing inequalities in subjective well-being means whereas individual-level changes show a pattern of cumulative (dis-)advantage. Using repeated cross-sectional data from the European Social Survey (N = 15,252) and employing hierarchical age-period-cohort models, we replicate the finding of decreasing inequality from the United States with the same research design for Germany. Using panel data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (persons = 47,683, person-years = 360,306) and employing growth curve models, we show that this pattern of decreasing inequality in subjective well-being means is accompanied by increasing inequality in intra-individual subjective well-being changes. This pattern arises because disadvantaged groups, such as the low educated and individuals with low subjective well-being show lower probabilities of continuing to participate in a survey and because both determinants reinforce each other. In addition to allowing individual changes and attrition processes to be examined, the employed multi-cohort panel data have further key advantages for examining inequality in subjective well-being over the life course: They require weaker assumptions to control for period and cohort effects and make it possible to control for interviewer effects that may influence the results.

scholarly journals Further decoding the mystery of American pain: The importance of work

PLoS ONE ◽  
2022 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. e0261891
Author(s):  
David G. Blanchflower ◽  
Alex Bryson
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Life Course ◽  
The Elderly ◽  
The United States ◽  
Cross Sectional ◽  
Wear And Tear ◽  
Educational Groups ◽  
Employment Rates ◽  
The Life Course ◽  
What Matters

A recent paper showed that, whereas we expect pain to rise with age due to accumulated injury, physical wear and tear, and disease, the elderly in America report less pain than those in midlife. Further exploration revealed this pattern was confined to the less educated. The authors called this the ‘mystery of American pain’ since pain appears to rise with age in other countries irrespective of education. Revisiting this issue with the same cross-sectional data we show that what matters in explaining pain through to age 65 is whether one is working or not. The incidence of pain across the life-course is nearly identical for workers in America and elsewhere, but it is greater for non-working Americans than it is for non-workers elsewhere. As in other countries, pain is hump-shaped in age among those Americans out of work but rises a little over the life-course for those in work. Furthermore, these patterns are apparent within educational groups. We show that, if one ascribes age-specific employment rates from other OECD countries to Americans, the age profile of pain in the United States is more similar to that found elsewhere in the OECD. This is because employment rates are lower in the United States than elsewhere between ages 30 and 60: the simulation reduces the pain contribution of these non-workers to overall pain in America, so it looks somewhat similar to pain elsewhere. We conclude that what matters in explaining pain over the life-course is whether one is working or not and once that is accounted for, the patterns are consistent across the United States and the rest of the OECD.

Second-Generation Contextual Mobility: Neighborhood Attainment from Birth to Young Adulthood in the United States

2019 ◽  
Vol 54 (2) ◽  
pp. 356-387 ◽  
Author(s):  
Van C. Tran
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
Longitudinal Data ◽  
Life Course ◽  
Young Adulthood ◽  
Second Generation ◽  
The United States ◽  
Neighborhood Context ◽  
The Life Course ◽  
Over Time

This article examines trajectories of neighborhood mobility for the post-1965 second generation in the United States. It advances the concept of second-generation contextual mobility, defined as the change in neighborhood context over the life course among the second generation. This analysis uses unique geocoded longitudinal data over three decades to documents patterns of second-generation neighborhood attainment. Compared to US blacks, the second generation has achieved significant contextual mobility both over time and across generations. Specifically, the second generation in this New York sample lived in better neighborhoods in young adulthood compared to birth neighborhood where their parents once lived. Most groups moved away from the most disadvantaged areas, with the exception of Dominicans. While the second generation has yet to achieve neighborhood parity with US whites, they have already surpassed US blacks in neighborhood attainment. Second-generation contextual mobility is thus an important, but missing, piece in established accounts of neighborhood mobility in the United States.

Prevalence of Tympanic Membrane Perforations Among Adolescents, Adults, and Older Adults in the United States

2021 ◽  
pp. 019459982110621
Author(s):  
Alexander S. Kim ◽  
Joshua F. Betz ◽  
Nicholas S. Reed ◽  
Bryan K. Ward ◽  
Carrie L. Nieman
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Older Adults ◽  
Life Course ◽  
Tympanic Membrane ◽  
Population Level ◽  
The United States ◽  
Population Estimates ◽  
Cross Sectional ◽  
Tympanic Membrane Perforations ◽  
The Life Course

Tympanic membrane (TM) perforations can occur at any age, but limited population-level data are available. Using data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, we performed a cross-sectional analysis of the prevalence and population estimates for TM perforations among individuals ≥12 years old in the United States. Overall, TM perforations have a prevalence of 2.1% (95% CI, 1.7%-2.6%), corresponding to 5.8 million Americans. Across the life course, older adults have the highest prevalence of TM perforations at 6.1% (95% CI, 4.7%-7.6%), corresponding to nearly 3 million Americans, as opposed to a prevalence of 0.6% (95% CI, 0.3%-0.9%) in adolescents, which equates to 0.2 million Americans. Males and females have a similar prevalence at 2.3% (95% CI, 1.6%-3.0%) among males and 2.0% (95% CI, 1.4%-2.6%) among females. These prevalence and population estimates provide the first US-based population estimates of the burden of TM perforations over the life course.

Sociohistorical and Demographic Perspectives on U.S. Remarriage in 1910

2002 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 199-241 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cheryl Elman ◽  
Andrew S. London
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Life Course ◽  
Family Life ◽  
The United States ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Ongoing Debate ◽  
American Life ◽  
Divorce Rates ◽  
The Life Course

Many scholars have noted the theoretical importance of remarriage in twentieth-century American life (Burch 1995; Cherlin 1998; Furstenberg 1980; Glick 1980; Thornton 1977; Uhlenberg and Chew 1986), yet few historical studies have examined remarriage in the United States empirically. This gap in the literature is noteworthy for two reasons. First, the turn of the twentieth century seems to have marked a crossover in the remarriage transition of the United States, reflecting changes in the pool of persons eligible to remarry. This transition was characterized by decreases in remarriage resulting from declines in mortality and the probability of widow(er)hood, followed by increases in remarriage resulting from higher divorce rates. The crossover in the transition was likely to have occurred when the pool of eligibles was at or near its nadir. Second, there is ongoing debate about the implications of remarriage for families and individuals (Booth and Dunn 1994), and about the impacts of remarriage on family functions (Cherlin 1978; Cherlin and Furstenberg 1994). In the light of these considerations, we believe it is important to examine remarriage and its consequences in the United States at the turn of the century so that we may better understand the ways that remarriage influences family life and shapes the life course of persons within families (see London and Elman 2001).

The U-Shape of Happiness: A Response

2021 ◽  
pp. 174569162098439
Author(s):  
David G. Blanchflower ◽  
Carol L. Graham
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Literature Review ◽  
Life Course ◽  
Well Being ◽  
The United States ◽  
Late Adolescence ◽  
Nationally Representative ◽  
The Life Course

We write in response to an article published in this journal, “The U Shape of Happiness Across the Life Course: Expanding the Discussion,” by Galambos, Krahn, Johnson and Lachman. The authors claim that “support for the purported U shape is not as robust and generalizable as is often assumed” and “we believe the conclusion that happiness declines from late adolescence to midlife (the first half of the U shape) is premature, and possibly wrong.” We respectfully disagree. The authors’ main evidence is based on summaries of 33 articles; they find 12 to have U shapes, seven to have none, and 14 to be mixed. We found that most of these articles are misclassified: Four of them are ineligible for inclusion, 25 find a U, and four are mixed. We then identified a further 353 articles, including 329 in peer-reviewed journals, that all found U shapes that were not identified in the literature review. This is a major omission. We also present our own evidence of midlife nadirs in well-being using around eight and a half million individual observations from nationally representative surveys for the United States and Europe. The midlife low occurs in the mid-40s and its drop is equivalent to roughly three quarters of the unprecedented drop observed in well-being during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document