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Title: Men's Mass Imprisonment and Race Differences in Women's Family Formation Behaviors

Citation Type: Dissertation/Thesis

Publication Year: 2014

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Abstract: The purpose of this dissertation is to provide a better understanding of race differences in womens family formation behaviors, including non-marital birth and marriage. This research addresses three aims using data from various sources. The first aim is to examine the demographic factors that contribute to racial differences in nonmarital fertility rates. The second research aim is to investigate how black mens incarceration (admission rate, release rate, and conditional release rate from/to prisons) is related to black womens non-marital fertility rate at the county level from 1985 to 2000. The last research aim is to examine how mens incarceration (admission rate, release rate, and conditional release rate from/to prisons) is associated with womens transition to first marriage and non-marital birth, and how this association differs by womens race. To examine the first research aim, I employed a decomposition analysis and found that sexual activity and post-conception marriage no longer contribute to racial differences in non-marital fertility. Instead, the pregnancy rate among sexually active single (not cohabiting) women is the largest contributor to race-ethnic variation in nonmarital fertility rates. More importantly, I find that contraceptive use patterns explain the majority of the race-ethnic differences in pregnancy rates. To pursue the second research aim, I used a fixed effects model and found that changes in black mens incarceration are positively associated with changes in black womens non-marital fertility rate between 1995 and 2000, even after adjusting for an extensive set of controls. Lastly, building on this finding, I also examined the relationship between mens incarceration and womens transition to first marriage and non-marital birth using a discrete time hazard model. The results indicate that county-level mens incarceration is negatively associated with womens transition to first marriage, even net of family background, individual womens SES, and other county characteristics. Although county-level mens incarceration contributes to the explanation of lower rates of transition to first marriage for women, it does not fully explain racial differences in marriage. Unlike marriage, womens transition to first non-marital birth is not significantly affected by county-level mens incarceration, net of womens SES and family background. Altogether, this study updated our knowledge about the relative importance of marriage to racial differences in non-marital fertility and better explained racial differences in family formation behaviors, including non-marital fertility and marriage, by linking them with mens incarceration.

Url: http://repositories.lib.utexas.edu/bitstream/handle/2152/27168/KIM-DISSERTATION-2014.pdf?sequence=1

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Authors: Kim, Yujin

Institution: University of Texas at Austin

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Publisher Location: Austin, Texas

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Data Collections: IPUMS USA, IPUMS NHGIS

Topics: Family and Marriage, Gender, Other, Race and Ethnicity

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