The Network, funded by the MacArthur Foundation, is directed by Frank Furstenberg, professor of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania.
According to the study, a demographic shift has occurred, almost without notice, but with important ramifications for the job market, the marriage market and public policy.
To examine the experiences of youth as they move toward adulthood, Elizabeth Fussell, a demographer at Tulane University, and Furstenberg of Penn used 1900-1990 U.S. Census data on youth aged 16-30 along with sample data from the Census Bureau's 2000 Current Population Survey.
Fussell and Furstenberg's report "The Transition to Adulthood During the 20th Century: Race, Nativity and Gender" includes findings on the shifting path to adulthood for native-born, foreign-born, white and black men and women.
The study finds that young people in the second half of the 20th century are traveling more pathways after finishing high school, combining more roles, exploring more options and gaining more education to prepare for an increasingly demanding labor force than did adolescents in the earlier half of the century. As a result, they are delaying but not abandoning marriage and family.
Among the study's other findings:
Although off from its high point in the 1950s and 1960s, when 67 percent of all white men and about 50 percent of black and foreign-born men fit this description, this combination has remained most common since the 1970s.
The results of the study are to be published in the forthcoming book "On the Frontier of Adulthood: Theory, Research, and Public Policy," edited by Richard A. Settersten, Furstenberg and Rubén G. Rumbaut (University of Chicago Press.)
The Network on Transitions to Adulthood studies individuals aged 18–30. It examines the multiple markers of adulthood and the variety of combinations and sequences in which they occur. The Network also explores how societal institutions may facilitate the transition from adolescence to adulthood. Information about the network is available at www.pop.upenn.edu/transad .