Health behaviors shape health and well-being in individuals and populations. Drawing on recent research, we review applications of the widely applied “social determinants” approach to health behaviors. This approach shifts the lens from individual attribution and responsibility to societal organization and the myriad institutions, structures, inequalities, and ideologies undergirding health behaviors. Recent scholarship integrates a social determinants perspective with biosocial approaches to health behavior dynamics. Empirical advances model feedback among social, psychological and biological factors. Health behaviors are increasingly recognized as multidimensional and embedded in health lifestyles, varying over the life course and across place and reflecting dialectic between structure and agency that necessitates situating individuals in context. Advances in measuring and modeling health behaviors promise to enhance representations of this complexity.

The high levels of depression among teenage mothers have received considerable research attention in smaller targeted samples, but a large-scale examination of the complex relationship between adolescent childbearing and psychological distress that explores bidirectional causality is needed. Using the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health) and the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study—Birth Cohort, we found that teenage mothers had higher levels of distress than their childless adolescent peers and adult mothers, but the experience of teenage childbearing did not appear to be the cause. Rather, teenage mothers’ distress levels were already higher than their peers before they became pregnant, and they remained higher after childbearing and into early and middle adulthood. We also found that distress did not increase the likelihood of adolescent childbearing except among poor teenagers. In this group, experiencing high levels of distress markedly increased the probability of becoming a teenage mother. Among nonpoor teenage girls, the relationship between distress and subsequent teenage childbearing was spurious.

Norms are a foundational concept in sociology. Following a period of skepticism about norms as overly deterministic and as paying too little attention to social conflict, inequalities, and agency, the past 20 years have seen a proliferation of norms research across the social sciences. Here we focus on the burgeoning research in sociology to answer questions about where norms come from, why people enforce them, and how they are applied. To do so, we rely on three key theoretical approaches in the literature—consequentialist, relational, and agentic. As we apply these approaches, we explore their implications for what are arguably the two most fundamental issues in sociology—social order and inequality. We conclude by synthesizing and building on existing norms research to produce an integrated theoretical framework that can shed light on aspects of norms that are currently not well understood—in particular, their change and erosion. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Sociology, Volume 46 is July 30, 2020. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

We used data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (N = 7,686) to determine whether racial and ethnic differences in socioeconomic stress and social protection explained group differences in the association between family structure instability and three risk behaviors for White, Black, and Mexican American adolescents: delinquent behavior, age at first nonmarital sex, and age at first nonmarital birth. The positive association between mothers' union transitions and each outcome for White adolescents was attenuated by social protection. The association of instability with age at first sex and first nonmarital birth was weaker for Black adolescents, but not for Mexican American adolescents. The weaker association was explained by Black adolescents' more frequent exposure to socioeconomic stress in the context of union instability. KeywordsDevelopment/outcomes; Adolescence; Family Diversity; Family Structure; Social Context A growing body of research has documented that family instability, defined as children's exposure to repeated changes in a parent's union status, has negative consequences for children's and adolescents' behavioral adjustment and school performance, independent of family structure at any point in time (Cavanagh & Huston, 2006;Fomby & Cherlin, 2007;Wu, 1996). The social significance of family instability has increased with its prevalence: today, approximately one-fifth of adolescents in the United States have experienced two or more changes in family structure (Cavanagh, 2008), a significant contrast to family organization during much of the twentieth century (Cherlin, 2009). The consequences of instability for children have become increasingly salient as the prevalence of births within cohabiting unions has increased (Chandra, Martinez, Mosher, Abma, & Jones, 2005) while cohabiting unions have remained relatively unstable union types compared to marriage (Manning, Smock, & Majumdar, 2004); as research has sought to explain why children born to single mothers who remain unmarried fare at least as well and perhaps better than children residing in stepfamilies (Cherlin & Furstenberg Jr., 1994); and as researchers have NIH-PA Author ManuscriptNIH-PA Author Manuscript NIH-PA Author Manuscript evaluated the consequences of marriage promotion programs targeted at low-income single mothers (Graefe & Lichter, 2007).Despite the increasing relevance of family instability to explain variation in children's behavioral and academic development, there has been little research to explain a provocative finding: instability appears to have a strong association with some aspects of behavioral development for White children, but not for Black children (Fomby & Cherlin, 2007;Wu & Martinson, 1993;Wu & Thomson, 2001). To address this discrepancy, we test two explanations that have been posited to explain racial and ethnic differences in children's adjustment to family change: social protection and socioeconomic stress (McLoyd, Cauce, Takeuchi & Wilson, 2000). We use nationally representati...

Research has long established the importance of individual health behaviors such as cigarette smoking for adult morbidity and mortality. However, we know little about how health behaviors cluster into health lifestyles among adolescents and young adults in the United States, or in turn, how such health lifestyles are associated with young adult health outcomes. This study establishes health lifestyles as distinct group phenomena at three developmental time points in a single cohort: late adolescence (ages 15–17), early adulthood (ages 20–24), and young adulthood (ages 26–31). We then identify the associations between these health lifestyles and young adult health outcomes. We use the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health), a nationally representative sample of U.S. adolescents followed into adulthood, and latent class analysis and regression models. We uncover diverse health lifestyles among adolescents, early adults, and young adults; however, few individuals engaged in a consistently salubrious lifestyle at any developmental stage. People with less healthy lifestyles also tended to exhibit poorer health in young adulthood. Our results showed that young adult health lifestyles were significantly associated with young adult cardiovascular risk. Moreover, health lifestyles in each of the three developmental stages were associated with young adult self-rated health, and accounting for lifestyles in later stages explained some of these associations. Overall, this study suggests a portrait of problematic health lifestyles among a nationally representative cohort of young Americans, with associated patterns of relatively poor physical health among those with poor health lifestyles.