The Relationship between Pathways to Adulthood and Adult Health

Shawn Bauldry, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Michael J. Shanahan, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Veronica Cole, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Recent work in stratification has drawn attention to inter- and intragenerational links between parent health, childhood health and socioeconomic status, and adult health and socioeconomic status. This study adopts a life course perspective to analyze the relationships between different pathways to adulthood and adult health. Latent class analysis is used to identify a parsimonious set of pathways to adulthood for males and females based on data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health. Once different pathways to adulthood are identified, pseudo-class draws are used to assign respondents to classes for regression analyses that examine associations between the pathways and measures of adult health (about age 30). Preliminary results indicate that pathways reflect socioeconomic origins and are significantly associated with self-rated health, blood pressure, smoking, and BMI. Thus, transition patterns to adulthood – with their attendant stressors and resources – may link socioeconomic origins with health at age 30.