▼ The public concern that immigrant families might be using a disproportionate share of social benefits and transmitting some form of public dependency to their children, combined with the rising levels of immigrants entering the country, fueled the passage of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act in 1996, which limited public assistance to many immigrant families. This dissertation uses the Current Population Survey and the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 to explore the association between exposure to welfare and young adult outcomes of educational attainment and labor force participation with a focus on parental nativity status as well as broad country of origin group. A group-level analysis is performed using linear probability models on aggregate national-origin groups to ascertain whether the welfare use of an immigrant group affects the average level of high school graduation, college enrollment, and welfare participation of the second generation, net of immigrant groups education level. An additional analysis assesses the relationship between prior parental welfare legacy and subsequent outcomes at the micro-level of the individual using binary and multinomial logit models. Results from the CPS analysis provide no evidence of an intergenerational correlation in welfare receipt across immigrant generations, but do provide descriptive evidence of a positive correlation between immigrant first generation welfare receipt and the young adult second generation educational attainment. The NLSY97 analysis shows a persistent negative association between welfare legacy and high school graduation; a negative association that is most pronounced for children of natives. Results of this study also show the largest effect of welfare receipt among the most disadvantaged group, the young adult children of immigrants from Mexican and Central American countries. The main finding of this study suggests that the negative impacts of welfare receipt might be lessened and in some cases reversed among the young adults from immigrant families. Such findings challenge the common notion that immigrant families use welfare as a crutch across generations and raise serious concern about U.S. immigration and welfare policies. Advisors/Committee Members: Van Hook, Jennifer.

▼ Using data from the 2005 BRFSS and 2005 ACS, this study analyzes the impact of race on the likelihood of developing hypertension and coronary heart disease (CHD). The focus on race is relevant: African-Americans are more likely to die with CHD than Whites, even though African-Americans are less likely to be diagnosed with CHD. To date, there is no empirical explanation on why this racial disparity exists. However, there are emerging biosocial and community context explanations that help situate why the racial disparity persists. Multivariate results indicate that race is and remains a significant predictor of both hypertension and CHD after controlling for demographic factors. Living in a segregated, hypersegregated or extremely hypersegregated community is also associated with increased odds of developing hypertension and CHD. These and other results document that community socioeconomic status may be more important for better health than individual SES. Policy implications are then discussed. Advisors/Committee Members: Goza, Franklin W.

▼ This dissertation uses 1979-2006 National Longitudinal Study of Youth data to explore three specific ways that parental socioeconomic status influences child health. First, I establish how timing matters in understanding how parental SES affects child. Results indicate that during formative years of child development, income is important for child health since it creates material conditions to ensure healthy development. However, as the child ages, the knowledge accrued by the parents through formal education becomes salient, as it ensures parents are supervising their child’s nutrition and maintaining good exercise/activity habits. In short, the SES-child health relationship is conditioned on the measure of SES employed. Second, I establish how socioeconomic transitions matter in understanding how parental SES affects child health. Results indicate that mother’s employment and instability in father’s work increased their child’s BMI. Maternal employment could be associated with a decreased parenting role in the monitoring of exercise and foods. Father’s work transitions contribute to increases in both mother’s and child’s BMI. Thus, stability in father’s employment is greatly beneficial for child health. Parental employment also decreased the odds of a child being functionally limited (limitation of daily activities due to chronic conditions). In this case, higher SES translates to monitoring of warning signs of being limited. In addition, parental employment means that their child will have health insurance coverage that enables them to see physicians who could assess warning signs of functional limitations. Third, I establish how exposure to different socioeconomic conditions before birth can shape child health. Results indicate socioeconomic selectivity does impact child health. Mothers whose mothers graduated high school are more likely to complete high school, but mothers whose mothers graduated college are less likely to complete college. Based on this intergenerational educational selectivity, I found that positive caretaking (e.g., breastfeeding) is associated with lower child BMIs while negative maternal characteristics (e.g., mothers with high BMIs) are associated with higher child BMIs. Thus, educational selectivity affects child health through values passed onto the child and the lifestyle in which the child is raised. In short, maternal education is directly tied to parenting, which relates to child health. Advisors/Committee Members: Goza, Franklin W.

▼ Although the U.S. student population has grown increasingly diverse both in terms of ethnicity and immigrant generational status since the late 1980s, schools have become more racially and ethnically segregated. Data also reveal that Latinos, the nation’s largest minority, have become increasingly segregated over the last 30 years, with their segregation levels surpassing those of blacks. In this dissertation, I investigate the effects of school racial composition on Latino adolescents’ academic achievement. The primary reason for focusing on Latinos adolescents is that they consistently account for the highest high school dropout rate among the nation’s major ethnic groups. Previous research suggests that academic achievement is a function of both individual and family level characteristics. Using the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health) data I examine the interplay of school racial and socioeconomic composition, school social capital, family social capital, ethnic origin, and immigrant generational status on measures of school success, such as school grades and standardized test scores, while controlling for individual (e.g., sex, age) and family (e.g., family structure, SES) factors. The longitudinal Add Health data possess a hierarchical structure such that the individual-level factors are viewed as nested within the school-level factors. Hierarchical linear modeling is used as an appropriate statistical procedure for examining these nested data. I found that school racial composition has little, if any, effect on Latino students’ academic achievement, but school socioeconomic composition does. Importantly, family social capital is likely to mitigate harmful influences of attending a low-SES school. I also found school social capital, as measured by peer network homogeneity and density, to be positively associated with Latino achievement. More than any other Latinos, Cuban-American adolescents were shown to have higher achievement in schools with more homogeneous and denser peer networks. Apart from that, I did not find any significant differences between ethnic origin and academic achievement. Similarly, beyond the first generation, immigrant generation was not associated with Latino achievement. However, the first-generation immigrant youth was found to have significantly lower AHPVT scores, but higher GPAs than native Latino adolescents. Advisors/Committee Members: Van Hook, Jennifer.

▼ Whether new Asian immigrant groups assimilate into American divorce culture the longer they stay in the U.S. is not well studied, nor is it clear how marital dissolution patterns change across immigrant generations. My research goal is to examine current trends and patterns of marital dissolution among Chinese and assess whether Chinese in the U.S. have more stable marriages than Chinese in China. The specific analyses conducted are designed to test hypotheses based on the assimilation, selection and abruption effect frameworks (Singley and Landale 1998). Several datasets, including China Health and Nutrition Survey (CHNS) and China 1990 Census, were used to examine the complexity of marriage and divorce in China. For Chinese immigrants in the US, the 1990 and 2000 Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS) and the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) were used. Overall, despite much speculation about rising divorce rates in China, the rates remain relatively low. In general, my findings show that Chinese immigrants, especially the newly-arrived female immigrants from China, are more likely to divorce/separate. This suggests that U.S. society has given women more leverage to choose their spouse and to be less tolerant of bad marriages. There was some evidence of an abruption effect among the less-educated Chinese male immigrants as they displayed even lower divorce rates compared to their male counterparts in China. Also, there is some weak evidence for the assimilation hypothesis among Chinese men over the generations, but not among Chinese women. Moreover, there is no evidence for the segmented assimilation hypothesis, as divorce rates among the highly educated Chinese are not similar to the upper middle class Americans, and divorce rates among the less-educated Chinese do not resemble the divorce patterns of working class Americans either. Furthermore, mixed marriages involving Asians are less stable than Asian endogamous marriages. For Chinese, however, the most unstable marriage is between foreign-born and American-born Chinese or Chinese with American citizenship. This suggests that there are Chinese who are trying to take advantage of the American immigration system and use marriage as a tool to achieve their goal of immigrating to the U.S. Advisors/Committee Members: Van Hook, Jennifer.