A growing body of research has evoked the life-course perspective to understand how experiences in school relate to a wide range of longer term life outcomes. This is perhaps best typified by the notion of the school-to-prison pipeline which refers to a process by which youth who experience punitive punishment in schools are increasingly enmeshed within the criminal justice system. While this metaphor is commonly accepted, few studies have examined the extent to which exclusionary school discipline significantly alters pathways toward incarceration as youth transition into young adulthood. Applying a life-course perspective and leveraging 15 waves of data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997, this study examines how school suspensions influence the odds of imprisonment during young adulthood. Mixed-effects longitudinal models demonstrate that receiving a suspension serves as a key turning point toward increased odds of incarceration, even after accounting for key covariates including levels of criminal offending. However, results show that repeated suspensions do not appear to confer additional risk of incarceration. Results carry implications for the ways in which school punishment impacts youths’ life-course.

Mothers with children from prior relationships or with stepchildren may perceive greater challenges in parenting than their counterparts in less complex families. We use the Families and Relationships Study (FRS) to analyze parental stress and perceptions of co-parenting among cohabiting and married mothers with resident minor children (N = 679). Compared to mothers with only shared children, parental stress and perceptions of co-parenting generally do not differ when mothers have children from prior unions. However, mothers with resident stepchildren evaluate the distribution of childcare as less fair, consider their partners as less reliable co-parents, and rate their partner more poorly as a co-parent relative to those with no stepchildren. These findings suggest that creating a stepfamily through one's own children may not present additional parenting challenges or stressors whereas having stepchildren introduced through a partner may be linked to a different, and less positive, parenting experience.

Cohabitation is one of the fastest growing family forms in the United States. It is widespread and continues to increase but has not been consistently measured across surveys. It is important to track the quality of data on cohabitation because it has implications for research on the correlates and consequences of cohabitation for adults and children. Recent rounds of the Current Population Survey (CPS), National Longitudinal Survey of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health), National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY-97), and National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG) provide an opportunity to contrast estimates of cohabitation status and experience using nationally representative data sets and assess the quality of data on cohabitation in these data sets. Results demonstrated that the surveys provide similar estimates of current cohabitation status, except the CPS resulted in lower estimates. In terms of cohabitation experience (i.e., having ever cohabited), Add Health produced higher estimates, whereas both the NSFG and NLSY-97 produced lower estimates. We documented a strong education gradient across all surveys, with lower levels of current cohabitation and cohabitating experience and with increases in educational attainment. Racial/ethnic differences in cohabitation were inconsistent across surveys. We discuss aspects of sampling and measurement that potentially explain differences in estimates. Our findings have implications not only for survey design but also for the interpretation of results based on these four national surveys.

No abstract

No abstract