Analysis of Young Men: Chapter Two. Determinants of Adult Socioeconomic Attainment in Young Men: An Analysis of the Role of Risk and Social Capital Factors, and the Pathways through Which They Have Their Impacts

In this chapter, a series of nested regression models are estimated to analyze three measures of adult socioeconomic attainment measured at age 29: (1) educational attainment; (2) occupational attainment; and (3) earnings. The models seek to relate risk, social capital, social-psychological factors, and life course events in early adulthood, both positive and negative, to each of the measures of adult attainment and to trace the social-psychological and life course pathways through which both risk and social capital have their impacts. The basic theoretical framework is from work by James Coleman (1988). The data are from the National Longitudinal Survey of Young Men, whose subjects were African-American and white men who were between the ages of 14 and 17 and living at home in 1966. Of the risk measures, low parental education, low family income, and having four or more siblings were most consistently associated with lower adult socioeconomic attainment. Having parents with a low occupational status, having fewer than two parents, and having grown up in a central city were not related for Whites, but the parental occupational status and having fewer than two parents were related to socioeconomic outcome for African Americans. Findings support the importance of social capital as a construct for modeling adult attainment. Three tables present analysis. (Contains 46 reference.) (SLD)