nonfamily living and the erosion of traditional family orientations among young adults

8/17/2019 Nonfamily Living and the Erosion of Traditional Family Orientations Among Young Adults

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Nonfamily Living and the Erosion of Traditional Family Orientations Among Young

Adults

Author(s): Linda J. Waite, Frances Kobrin Goldscheider and Christina Witsberger

Source: American Sociological Review , Vol. 51, No. 4 (Aug., 1986), pp. 541-554Published by: American Sociological Association

Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2095586

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NONFAMILY LIVING AND THE EROSION OF

TRADITIONAL FAMILY ORIENTATIONS

AMONG YOUNG ADULTS*

LINDA J. WAITE FRANCES KOBRIN GOLDSCHEIDER

The Rand Corporation Brown University

CHRISTINA WITSBERGER

The Rand Corporation

Young adults in recent cohorts have been leaving the parental home earlier and marrying

later now than they did several decades ago, resulting in an increased period of independent

living. This paper explores the consequences of time spent in non-family living, using data

from the National Longitudinal Surveys of Young Men and Young Women. We expect that

experience in living away from home prior to marriage will cause young adults to change

their attitudes, values, plans, and expectations, and move them away from a traditional

family orientation. We find strong support for this hypothesis for young women; those who

lived independently became more likely to plan for employment, lowered their expected

family size, became more accepting of employment of mothers, and more non-traditional on

sex roles in the family than those who lived with their parents. Non-family living had much

weaker effects on young men in the few tests that we could perform for them. The paper also

addresses the conditions under which living away increases individualism, and it discusses

the implications of these findings.

Beginning with the 1950s, the living arrangements

of American adults have been undergoing major

changes. More and more unmarried adults are

living apart from their immediate families, forming

non-family households' at a rate that far exceeds

the growth in the adult population. During the

1970s, non-family households increased 73 percent

while family households increased only 13 percent

(U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1980). This develop-

ment can be seen as a further extension of the

changes accompanying modernization that have

resulted in a decline in the centrality of the family.

Many have argued that this process may have

accelerated over the past several decades, as

indicated by a series of demographic changes,

including rising ages at marriage, falling propor-

tions of the population ever marrying, declining

fertility and particularly marital fertility, the

sizeable proportion of marriages expected to end in

divorce, and the large numbers of children living

with only one parent for at least part of their

childhood (Westoff, 1978; Davis, 1982; Espenshade,

1985).

Wth these changes have come substantial

changes in attitudes toward family life. For

example, recent surveys show increasing accep-

tance of divorce, permanent singleness and child-

lessness (Thornton and Freedman, 1982). Changes

in attitudes are normally explained by changes in

the social structure. However, it is also possible

that these effects are reinforced for individuals by

their own experiences, causing further shifts in

their family-related attitudes and behavior. Life

course theory predicts that this would be particu-

larly likely for experiences early in life-in

childhood or early adulthood. Other things equal,

parental divorce increases the likelihood of divorce

for children (Pope and Mueller, 1976), teenage

parenthood is more common among daughters of

teenage mothers (Baldwin and Cain, 1980),

number of siblings positively affects own actual

and expected family size (Terhune, 1974; Waite and

Stolzenberg, 1976) and children raised in non-

intact families are less likely to marry at all but

very young ages (Kobrin and Waite, 1984).

In this context, perhaps the most critical

characteristic of the rapid increase in non-family

households is its concentration among very young

adults. While non-family households increased

their share of U. S. households from 15 to 22

percent between 1960 and 1975 over all ages, the

comparable increase for households with heads age

25 or less was from 13 to 30 percent (Frey and

Kobrin, 1982). Young adults are leaving the

parental home substantially earlier now than they

did in the past. In Rhode Island, for example, the

American Sociological Review, 1986, Vol. 51 (August:541-554) 541

* Please address all correspondence to Linda J. Waite,

Senior Sociologist, The Rand Corporation, 1700 Main

Street, P.O. Box 2138, Santa Monica, CA 90406-2138.

The research reported here was supported by Contract

No. NOI-HD-12814 from the Center for Population

Research, National Institute of Child Health and Human

Development. We would like to thank Lee Lillard, Julie

DaVanzo, and the members of the Rand Population

Research Center Workshop for helpful comments.

l Non-family households consist of an individual

living alone or with unrelated persons.



3/15

542 AMERCANSOCOLOGCAL REVEW

percentage of sons still at home at age 26 dropped

from 50 percent for those who had reached that age

between 1930 and 1950, to 20 percent for those

reaching that age between 1976 and 1979. The

comparable decline for daughters was from 37 to

13 percent (Goldscheider and LeBourdais, 1986).

When the trend toward earlier nestleaving

began, it was associated with declining marriage

age. However, it now is increasingly combined

with delays in marriage, with the result that more

and more young people are spending an important

part of early adulthood in a context in which family

roles may be much less salient, and are developing

tastes and skills that are likely to reduce their

orientation to family roles. The transition to

adulthood for recent cohorts is following a

distinctly different pattern from that of their

parents, and could well have a substantial

influence on their later lives. We have already

documented that the experience of non-family

living leads to a postponement of marriage, at least

for women (Goldscheider and Waite, 1985). But

does it have an influence on the kinds of marriages

eventually formed through its effects on expecta-

tions about the balance of work and family roles? It

is these influences that we wish to explore.

BACKGROUND AND HYPOTHESES

The centrality of family formation in all societies

results in well-defined norms, rooted in an

underlying sexual division of labor, norms that

traditionally lead women to orient themselves more

toward family roles than do men. In the United

States the proper ages at which to marry and bear a

first child are normatively well defined, and clearly

differ for men and women, allowing men more

time to acquire adult levels of independence and

autonomy (Ryder and Westoff, 1971; Rindfuss and

Bumpass, 1978; Modell, 1979). Scanzoni (1975)

found that marriage, work, and fertility are

strongly associated with sex-role norms: women

who defined themselves through traditional female

roles married earlier, were less likely to be

employed full-time or to use effective contracep-

tion, and expected to bear more children than

women with a more non-familial orientation. He

sees sex-role modernity primarily as an emphasis

on individualism (although he makes this equation

reluctantly), and summarizes his results by conclud-

ing that The greater the individualism, the less

the familism (p. 187).

Family-related norms clearly affect the behavior

of individuals; they may also respond to that

behavior, as Marini (1984) argues. In either case,

it is important to establish how such attitudes are

formed and altered by experience. Although some

researchers postulate that family-related norms are

laid down early in life (Blake, 1972; Gustavus and

Nam, 1970; Hoffman and Wyatt, 1960), other

researchers have emphasized how experiences

outside the family can induce changes in these

family-derived values and tastes. Mason (1974)

has argued that a role hiatus between the

traditional role of daughter and the traditional roles

of wife and mother gives young women an

opportunity to develop tastes for roles alternative

to motherhood-especially employment-that as a

result alter family formation. Rubin (1976) cites

impressionistic evidence that the rigidity of sex

roles in working-class families may result from

early marriage and men's lack of experience in

living independently of women-either mother or

wife-whose role it was to care for their physical

needs. This suggests that a role hiatus may also

affect young men's sex-role traditionality.

Spitze (1978) tested the role hiatus hypothesis

with longitudinal data, and found that those

women who attended college increased their

preference for employment, whereas those who

worked increased their preference for full-time

work in the home. However, a great many who

work or attend college after high school remain in

the parental home (Goldscheider and DaVanzo,

1985). Non-family living prior to marriage may

provide a more complete hiatus, and lead to

changes in the family-related attitudes, plans and

expectations of young men and women.

We test this proposition by examining young

women's plans for employment over the long run,

their total expected family size, the number of

children that they feel is an ideal family, men's and

women's attitudes toward the employment of

mothers under various conditions, and two dimen-

sions of global sex-role attitudes. Together these

measures reflect many aspects of young adults'

orientation to family versus individual concerns. In

these analyses, we hold constant their earlier plans'

and attitudes, measured-to the extent possible-

prior to any exposure to non-family living.

However, we show as well that omitting such

controls does not bias the results observed, since

the likelihood of non-family living in early

adulthood is not strongly related to underlying

work and family attitudes.

Specifically, we test the following propositions:

-The experience of non-family living during

early adulthood affects the attitudes, values,

and plans of young adults, compared with the

levels measured before the experience, and

moves them away from a traditional family

orientation.

-Living away from home has stronger effects

on personal plans and expectations than on

more global ideals, although the latter may be

affected as well, presaging normative change.

-Non-family living will have stronger effects

on the attitudes, expectations, and plans of

women than of men, since more of a role

hiatus is expected for men, even under



4/15

ONAMLYLVNG543

traditional sex-role regimes, but non-family

living may affect men's views as well.

-Nonfamily living interacts with education past

high school to alter attitudes, expectations and

plans. Both attending college and living away

from parents influence young adults, but those

who go away to college change their views

more than those who go to college while

living at home.

-Those with more family-oriented attitudes are

not less likely to live away from home during

early adulthood than others, so that effects of

non-family living will not change greatly with

the addition or omission of controls for

attitudes, expectations or plans at time one

(prior to the risk period for nonfamily

living).2

DATA AND METHODS

Data for this analysis come from the National

Longitudinal Surveys of Young Women and

Young Men. Conducted by the Ohio State

University Center for Human Resource Research,

these surveys include information over a recent

15-year period on more than 10,000 young men

and women. Personal interviews were conducted

with national probability samples of the non-

institutionalized population of females age 14 to 24

in 1968, and males age 14 to 24 in 1966. Those

included responded to lengthy interviews in many

of the succeeding years through the early 1980s.3

Attrition from the sample over the panel period has

been relatively low; three-fourths of the original

Young Women's sample was re-interviewed in

1978, and seventy percent of the original Young

Men's sample was re-interviewed in 1976. These

are the last years used here.

The analysis reported in this paper uses as

control variables measures of stable respondent

characteristics, such as race and characteristics of

the parental family, taken at the initial survey

(1966 for the Young Men, 1968 for the Young

Women). Independent variables measuring the

respondent's current situation-for example, em-

ployment, education or marital status-were mea-

sured contemporaneously with the dependent

variable. Most models incorporate two measures of

the relevant attitudes, plans, or expectations: one

measured at the beginning of the period and one

measured later and used as the dependent variable.

Our sample is restricted to those age 14 to 17 in the

first year of the survey to allow us to observe and

measure a complete history of non-family living

prior to marriage.4 Thus, we have data on Young

Women from 1968 through 1978, and on Young

Men from 1966 through 1976; each group was 24

to 27 years old at the last interview analyzed here.

The outcome measures include a wide range of

young adults' family- and sex-role-related atti-

tudes, plans, and expectations. First, young

women were asked in each survey year about their

plans to work at age 35, as an indicator of long-run

plans for employment. We divided this measure

into (a) those who planned to work and (b) those

who planned not to or were undecided.5 Second,

we include two measures of fertility asked in 1971,

1973, and 1978: young women's expected family

size and the number of children that they think is

ideal for a family. Expected family size was

measured from questions on children already born

and additional children expected in the future.

Taken together, these questions cover the primary

roles-mother and worker-that young women

must balance during their adult lives.

Third, we examine three measures of respondents'

views about the proper ways that mothers in

general should balance work and family roles;

these are all scales. One of these, called attitude

toward mothers' working, consists of the sum of

responses to three questions (coded as five-point

Likert scales) about the conditions under which the

respondent thinks that married mothers of pre-

school children may work, given that a trusted

relative is available for child care: (1) if she needs

the money; (2) if she wants to and her husband

agrees; and, (3) if she wants to but her husband

doesn't particularly like it (see Appendix). The

points from these three items were summed into a

single scale which ranges from 3 (traditional) to 15

(liberal).6 Young Women answered these questions

2 If early attitudes and non-family living are not

strongly related, then eliminating early attitudes from the

equation for later attitudes does not introduce specifica-

tion bias; hence, where early and later attitudes are

strongly related, lack of change in the coefficient for

non-family living when early attitudes are added or

dropped indicates that young adults' likelihood of living

away from home does not vary with their early attitudes.

3 The NLS Young Women were interviewed annually

from 1968 through 1973, again in 1975, 1977, 1978, the

Young Men annually from 1966 through 1971, and again

in 1973, 1975, 1976, the last years that we use in the

analysis reported here.

'Preliminary examination of the available data

showed that none of the young women, and only a few

young men, lived away from home before age 18. Since

the initial survey did not ask about prior years' living

arrangements, we could not know if those older than age

17 at the first survey had already experienced some years

of non-family living.

5 Specifically, the young women were asked what kind

of work they would like to be doing when they are 35.

Coded responses were: a) married, keeping home, raising

a family; b) same as present job; c) don't know; and d) an

occupation other than their current one.

6 For each of the three questions, five points were

assigned the response definitely all right, and one

point to definitely not all right. The mid-point

response was undecided. Although these three items

comprise a formal Guttman scale, we report results for a



5/15


in 1968, 1972, and 1978; the Young Men did so in

1971 and 1976.

Finally, two more general indices of sex-role

attitudes were included in the 1972 and 1978

Young Women's interviews (see Appendix). These

were Likert-type questions, also coded as five-

point scales. The questions overlap to a substantial

extent in the two years but are not identical. They

deal with the impact of women's employment on

their families, and include value judgements about

appropriate roles for men and women. The

variables used in our analyses are the composite

indices (or factor scores) derived from the

coefficient matrix of a factor analysis done with

oblique rotation. Our factor analysis of each of the

series produced two distinct dimensions. One,

which we called sex-role attitudes (Family),

reflects the importance of women's time at home to

their children and families. The second dimension,

sex-role attitudes (Jobs), measures views of the

importance of women's employment to their

self-esteem and to the economic well-being of their

families. A higher score indicates greater accep-

tance of non-familial roles for wives and mothers.

Finding two distinct dimensions of sex-role

attitudes in this series of questions replicates

results from a number of other studies. Mason and

Bumpass (1975) and Mason et al. (1976) found,

using questions overlapping to some extent with

those that we use, that respondents answered

relatively consistently all questions on the appro-

priateness of the traditional division of labor within

the family, and those on rights of the sexes in the

labor market, but apparently saw little need to

connect their views across these two dimensions.

Our key indicator of non-family living is the

proportion of the years that the respondent lived

outside the parental family between age 17 and

first marriage or the terminal date for the analysis,

whichever occurs first.7 Non-family living could

include years spent in a college dormitory, military

barracks, living with roommates of either sex and

living alone. This measure uses the proportion of

potential years of non-family living actually away

from home, rather than the number of years, to

control for the differences between individuals in

the potential number of years. Since all respon-

dents in our sample were living at home and

unmarried as of the first interview, only those who

married at age 18 had an opportunity to live away

from home prior to marriage.

One disadvantage of the use of proportion rather

than number of years is that the smaller the number

of potential years of non-family living, the easier it

is to have spent either all or none of it actually

away from home. If we assume that individuals

have an underlying propensity to live away from

home, then we have fewer observations on this

propensity for individuals with a small number of

potential years away. This gives us inefficient but

unbiased estimates of these underlying propensities

for these individuals.

The use of proportion rather than number of

years away implies that the first year of non-family

living has a larger effect than subsequent years,

with the effect of each year declining at a rate of

(years - 1)/years, a slow to moderate decay

function. This function makes sense theoretically,

as we expect that the new experiences a young

adult undergoes by living away, as well as the new

skills acquired, are largest in the first year, with

additional skills and experiences added at a

declining rate with more years of non-family

living.

One could argue, alternatively, that family living

should include both time living with parents and

time living with a spouse. Just as young people

may decide to leave the family to live away, so

they may decide to form a new family of their

own. This argument implies a specification of

proportion of potential years of non-family living

spent actually away, that includes in the denomi-

nator all the years from age 17 until the measure of

the dependent variable, including years after

marriage, since the person could have lived away

those years if he or she had not married. We

created such a measure and include a discussion of

it in our results.

We measure living arrangements for respondents

using the household listing available in each survey

year. This gives the relationship to the respondent

of all individuals living in the household, their age,

sex, and certain other characteristics. Thus, we can

summated rating scale of the items, as described above,

to preserve maximum information about the respondents'

views toward employment of mothers. However, we

repeated all analyses after coding the items into a

Guttman scale. We created this scale with two alternative

coding schemes, either including or eliminating the

undecided category as a pass. Both scales performed

comparably. This Guttman scale has a coefficient of

reproducibility ranging from 0.97 to 0.99 for the Young

Women in 1968, 1972, and 1978, and a coefficient of

scalability varying between 0.81 to 0.94 for the same

years. For the Young Men, the Guttman scale on the

same items has a coefficient of reproducibility of 0.97 in

both years, and a coefficient of scalability of 0.85 and

0.87 in 1971 and 1976, respectively. Thus, the scales

appear to have identical-and excellent-measurement

properties for Boys and Girls.

7 This measure reflects the respondent's living arrange-

ments at the survey date, the only time for which we have

information about this variable. Living arrangements for

young adults have never been measured-to our

knowledge-at less than one-year intervals. We assume

relatively little change between survey dates in family vs.

non-family living. We weighted survey years to reflect

the actual amount of time between surveys.



6/15

ONAMLYLVNG545

identify those respondents who reside with parents

and those who live away at the survey date.8

We have also included as controls other

variables that are likely to affect the family- and

sex-role-related plans and attitudes of young

adults. These include family background character-

istics (socioeconomic status and family structure)

measured at the initial survey, and current

socioeconomic and family characteristics, mea-

sured in the same year as the dependent variable.

Table 1 presents definitions, means, and standard

deviations of all independent and dependent

variables.

Our analytic strategies vary depending on how

often and in which years measures of the

dependent variables were obtained. One measure,

work plans, was asked of the young women in

every survey year. The first response to this

question, asked when the young women were 17

years old, provides a Time 1 baseline before any

non-family living could occur from which we

measure change. Plans for work at age 35 stated at

later ages are the dependent variable. We arbi-

trarily selected these later ages to be 20, 22, and 24

years old, at periods of 3, 5, and 7 years after the

first measure, based on questions answered for

20-year-olds between 1971 and 1973; for 22-year-

olds between 1973 and 1975; and for 24-year-olds

between 1975 and 1978. This portion of the

analysis provides the strongest test of our hypoth-

eses, in that work plans prior to any experience of

non-family living can be fully controlled. Compar-

ing the effects of non-family living with and

without controlling work plans at age 17 tests the

importance of controlling them.

The second set of dependent variables includes

those measured only occasionally. These are

expected and ideal fertility, attitudes toward

mothers who work under certain specific condi-

tions, and the more global set of questions on

sex-role attitudes (Family and Jobs). For these

dependent variables we modified our analytic

strategy to use the later measure as the dependent

variable, with the earlier measure included as an

independent variable to provide an approximate

baseline. Thus, in our analysis of fertility expecta-

tions and ideal fertility, we predict 1973 expecta-

tions and ideals (when the young women were

aged 19 to 22) from 1971 expectations and ideals

(when they were 17 to 20), plus characteristics and

experiences of the individual. This latter analytic

strategy does not always allow us to measure the

attitude in question before any experience with

non-family living. We test the importance for our

conclusions of this limitation.

For clarity, we have included a brief table that

gives the ages of the young women and the survey

years included for various outcome measures. The

young men were ages 24 to 27 when we measured

their attitudes toward mothers' work in 1976.

Equations with continuous dependent variables,

including both measures of fertility and all the

attitude scales, are estimated with ordinary least

squares. Equations for work plans, a dichotomy,

use logistic regression, estimated with maximum-

likelihood techniques (Goodman, 1976). To permit

comparison of the effects of the independent

variables across equations, we transformed the

logit coefficients to yield measures analogous to

unstandardized ordinarily least squares (OLS)

regression coefficients (Hanushek and Jackson,

1977). The transformed logit coefficients reflect

the estimated effect of a unit change in the

independent variable on the probability of planning

to work at age 35, evaluated at the sample means.

RESULTS

We discuss the results of the analyses described

above as they provide evidence on each of the

hypotheses presented earlier. We begin with the

first and most general hypothesis-that nonfamily

living changes young adults' plans, expectations

and attitudes about family and work roles away

from a traditional family orientation. Before we

discuss the individual models, however, we must

note the strikingly consistent picture that emerges

across the wide range of measures analyzed for

females: living away from parents tends to alter

young women's attitudes, expectations and plans

toward non-familial roles. The more experience

that young women have with independent living,

the more they change their plans for later work,

their family size expectations, their attitude toward

work by mothers, and their family-related sex-role

attitudes away from a traditional family orienta-

tion. In contrast, no significant effects appear in

the one analysis possible for young men, although

the coefficients have the expected sign.

Turning to the detailed results, we see in Table 3

that after controlling for young women's plans for

employment as reported when they were 17 years

old, the higher the proportion of years lived away

from parents between age 17 and the age in

question (or first marriage, whichever came first),

the greater the likelihood that the young women

planned to work at age 35. This effect is large and

significant for age 20, although it attenuates in size

with increasing age, suggesting that the effects of

non-family living may be short-lived. The coeffi-

cients imply that a young woman who lived away

all of the time between age 17 and 20 or her

marriage (whichever came first) was about 10

percentage points more likely to plan for later

employment, net of her plans stated only 3 years

8 For further details, on measures of living arrange-

ments available from these data see Goldscheider and

Waite (1985) and Goldscheider (1985).



7/15


Table 1. Description of Independent Variables Used in the Analysis*

Means (standard

deviations for

continuous variables)

Nonfamily living Proportion of years spent in non-family living between .199

age 17 and first marriage or age in question (.309)

Work 35 at 17 (D) Plans to work when age 35 as measured at age 17 .416

Back(D 0=Whte andotherraces .299

Non-Intact (D) Did not live wth 2 natural parents at age 14 .186

Parents Education Average years of school competed 10397

byprens 3225

outhD Cenus regon396

Size of Labor Scale ranging from1 (rural) to 8 3.431

Force in Area (urbanzed areas of 3 mllion or more) (2.356)

YearYearbecam age inquestion74.019

(1.001)

EducationYears of schoolingcomleted12581

(2.189)

Enrolled(D Enrolledinschool ful-tim .119

Empoyed (D) Current full-time or part-time empoyment .573

usbands total income In 1967 constant dollars (thousands) 2.504

(3.664)

Mrried (D) Currently married for the first time .466

Divorced (D) Currently divorced, separated, or wdowed 062

Remrred(D Currentlyremrred.014

Kds (D Livngwthownchldren.368

Emloyed*kds Interactionterm.132

Standard deviation

(for continuous

Dependent Variables Means variables)

Plans to hold a job at age 35

(I=yes, 0=no):

ag20551

ag22554

ag24652

Attitude toward mothers working

(3 to 15, high = more liberal):

Girls

196897332577

1972106822400

Boys

1971106722926

1976117852780

Sex-role attitudes (Family)

(-2.9 to 1.6, high = more liberal):

972005875

978025923

Sex-role attitudes (Jobs)

(-2.3 to 1.8, high = more liberal):

1972 008711

1978 003715

Expected family size

(in children, 0 to 13):

197125091561

197319491253

Ideal family size

(in children, 0 to 14):

197129441251

197326201130

(D) Dummy variable.

* The statistics for the independent variables come from the Young Women's sample at age 22.



8/15

NONAMLYLVNG547

Table 2. Ages and Years Measured for Young Women

urveyYars Aes

Work Plans Attitude toward

at Ages: Mothers Wrkng Fertility Sex Roles

ge n1968 20 22 24 1972 1973 1978

14 1978

5197319751977 18-21 19-22 2427

16 1972

17 1971 1973 1975

No surveys were done in 1974 or 1976.

earlier, compared with a woman who did not live

away during this period.9

The analysis of young women's attitudes toward

mothers' working, shown in the first column of

Table 4, also shows strong, statistically significant

positive effects of non-family living on acceptance

of employment of married mothers with young

children. A young woman who lived away from

home all of the possible years between age 17 and

marriage, or Time 2, increased her score on this

scale by about 1 point on a 13-point scale

compared with someone who never lived away.

We find similar patterns in our analysis of the total

number of children expected by young women.

Living away from home reduces fertility expecta-

tions, with a decline for those who experience

non-family living throughout the interval of about

a quarter of a child, compared with those who

either always lived with parents or moved straight

from parents to husband. '0

Ideal family size (Table 4, column 4), in

contrast, shows no effect of non-family living.

This result reinforces the theoretical and analytic

differences between these measures. Ideals seem

quite stable, as reflected by the somewhat larger

effect of the prior measure for this than for birth

expectations, and by the lack of effect from all the

new experiences except school enrollment.

The right-most columns of Table 4 present the

two sex-role attitudes scores (Family and Jobs),

measured in 1978. The results show that non-

family living increases both young women's

acceptance of non-family roles for women with

family responsibilities (Family) and their view of

the benefits of women's employment to their

self-esteem and to their families' economic posi-

tion (Jobs). When we analyze these two scales as

measured in 1972, without a Time 1 control, we

find an even stronger effect of non-family living on

Family, but no effect on Jobs (results not shown).

These results for 1978, an outcome measured at the

latest survey year and at the oldest ages, suggest

that the effects of non-family living are not

necessarily short-lived, despite the attenuation

apparent on active work plans; its influence

persists up to a decade for fundamental attitudes

about women's work and family roles.

We performed several checks on the susceptibil-

ity of our findings to changes in the measurement

of non-family living. First, we re-estimated all the

9 We were concerned with the possibility that the

effects we observed for non-family living might be

spurious, resulting from the unmeasured effects of work

experience, since our models include only current

employment status. We thought this unlikely, since

Spitze (1978) found that holding a job rather than going

to college during early adulthood caused a decrease in

young women's taste for employment at age 35. We also

knew that research on the relationship of employment and

non-family living early in adulthood has shown them to

be only weakly related. Many young adults leave home

for non-work related reasons, and many others remain at

home and work after finishing school. McElroy (1983)

found a weak positive relationship between employment

and non-family living for a sample of high school

dropouts and Goldscheider and DaVanzo (1985) found a

weak negative relationship over the seven years after

completing high school in a sample that was restricted to

those who reached twelfth grade.

Nevertheless, reasoning that the problem should be

most acute for employment-related attitudes, we re-

estimated the models of plans for work at age 35 (shown

in Table 3) three times, substituting various detailed

measures of employment history for current employment.

These measures were: (1) the proportion of years since

age 17 that the respondent worked at all at any time

during the year; (2) the proportion of years that the

respondent worked at least 1000 hours (approximately half

time); and (3) the proportion of years that the respondent

worked at least 26 weeks (approximately a half-year).

Each of these models showed exactly the same pattern of

effects of non-family living on changes in work plans,

with the same pattern of significance. In fact, the

coefficients for our measure of non-family living were

larger in each of the alternate specifications than in that

with current employment. We conclude that the use of

current employment does not mask effects of employ-

ment history in the model that theoretically should have

the strongest effects of employment on the outcome

measure, and that our results with current employment

are probably somewhat conservative. To keep the

complexity of the reported results within reasonable

bounds we report only the analyses with current

employment, but the alternative specifications are

available from the authors on request.

10 As we noted earlier, we repeated all these analyses

with this scale coded into a Guttman scale, coded from 0,

for those who agreed that mothers should work under

none of the stated conditions, to 3, for those who agreed

that mothers could work under all the conditions. The

substantive conclusions were identical.



9/15


Table 3. Effects of Non-family Living and Other Variables on Young Women's Plans to Work at Age 35

Age

xpantoryVrabes 20 22 24

nfamyLvng0101** 0083 0042

Wrk pans for 35 measured at age 17 0279** 0213** 0179**

Back0138**0128**0021

nntact 0075**-0051 0116**

arens Education-0004 0006 -0003

moyd0042 -00330158**

nroed0284**0186**0132*

Sze 00020010-0002

Souh0053*00510057*

Yar-0037**-00070021*

rred-00030031 -0066

vorced/Separated 0023 0049 -0069

mrred-0031 0111 0065

Husbands Total ncom -0006 -0011 0001

Kd 0080*00570161**

moyd*Kd0091 0068 -0079

Educational Attainmnt 0037**0059**0039**

227740928

2 - log-likelihood ratio (df= 18) 240.43 113.93 103.01

One-tailed significance:

* p. 05


10/15

NONAMLYLVNG549

Second, we re-estimated these models using a

specification of non-family living that allows for

separate effects for each number of years of

independent living, given years at risk. It also

controls for number of years at risk, that is, the

number of years between age 17 and the measure

of the dependent variable. In no case did this

fully saturated model significantly improve on the

fit of the restricted model that we estimated, as

measured by F-statistics for the regressions and

Chi-squared statistics for the logits (all p > .08).

Among the control variables, a result worth

noting is that for NONINTACT, which also

measures non-traditional living arrangements.

NONINTACT shows a positive effect on plans for

work at age 35 at two of the three ages presented in

Table 3; in the equations for the other measures

NONINTACT tends to operate in the same

direction as non-family living. Where it has any

effect, it decreases family orientation, suggesting

that living in a non-traditional family during

adolescence moves young women away from plans

for family roles later in life. This finding is

consistent with our proposition that experiences in

non-family living during young adulthood erode an

orientation toward traditional family roles.

We also find that education is less associated

with family-oriented attitudes and plans, as is

current employment, but we see effects of marital

status only for sex-role attitudes and expected

family size. Not surprisingly, women who experi-

ence marital disruption have decreased their

expected number of children. Married women and

working mothers hold more liberal views on the

Jobs measure, whereas divorced and remarried

women are more liberal on the Family scale. Black

women seem to hold more positive attitudes

toward work, however this is measured, and to

have a somewhat larger expected and ideal family

size, but do not differ from whites on family-

related sex-role attitudes.

Our second proposition states that non-family

living not only affects personal plans and expecta-

tions, but also influences global ideals, although

less strongly, since individuals are likely to use the

extenuating circumstances in their particular case

to justify deviations from the ideal that they hold,

at least for a while. The results presented in Tables

3 and 4 offer mixed support for this reasoning. We

find no significant effect of non-family living on

ideal family size. However, we see significant

effects of living away on attitudes toward mothers'

working and both the Family and Jobs dimensions

of the Sex-role attitudes measure. All these

represent global, rather than personal views. We

conclude that non-family living affects some but

not all dimensions of global attitudes.

Our third hypothesis deals with sex differences

in the effects of independent living. The NLS data

contain very few measures of young men's

attitudes toward family life or appropriate roles for

men and women. The one measure available (for

1971 and 1976) corresponds exactly to one of the

scales analyzed for young women: attitude toward

mothers' working. This is shown in the second

column of Table 4. We see no significant effect of

non-family living on men's views, in contrast to

those we found for women. Note, however, that

the coefficient for young men has the expected sign

and is nearly significant at the p


11/15

550AMERCANSOCOLOGCAL REVEW

Table 5. Transformed Logit Coefficients for Models of Young Women's Plans, Attitudes and Expectations

(Controlling for All Variables in Table 2)

Plans for Work at Age 35

202224

Model 1

nfamyLvng0101** 0083 0042

Model 2

oege * awy0173** 0215** 0148**

oege * hom 0118** 0107** 0046

oege other awy0161* 0131 0139*

ncoege awy0000 0007 -0014

Model 3

oege * awy0140** 0078 0026

oege * hom 0088** 0003 -0047

oege other awy0141 0052 0079

ncoege awy0002 0023 0003

Educational attainmnt 0029**0056**0041*

titude towrd Sex-roe

Mothers Wrkng Expected Ideal Attitudes

Girs Boys Famly Size Famly Sizes Famly Jobs

1972 1976 197319731978 1978

Model 1

Nonfamly Living 0979** 0261 -.225** -.066 0161** 0112*

Model 2

College awy0328*0400*0026 0036 0241**0027

College hom -0145 0016 0038 0076 0115*-0061

College other away -0382 0230 -0307* -0282* 0382** 0099

Non-college away 0.551** -0.077 -0.199** -0.083 0.055 0.043

Model 3

College awy0204 -0342 -00090027 0166**0071

College hom -0235 -0567*0012 00690061 -0030

College other away -0427 -0308 -0322* -0285* 0344** 0121

Non-college away 0581** -0089 - 0193** -0081 0067 0036

Educational attainment 0094* 0204** 0020 0005 0024* -0014

models, of a measure of educational attainment.

The two sets of analyses point to the same

conclusion: young women who live away from

home while attending college are more likely to

change their work plans than those who attend

college while living at home. These women, in

turn, are significantly more likely to change their

work plans toward employment than those who

remain at home and do not go to college. Those

who live at home while in college, but live

independently at some other time, also exhibit an

increased preference for working at age 35,

although the effect is not significant. Those who

live away from home without attending college

show no difference from the omitted category.

Adding educational attainment to the model

controls for the effect of years of school completed

by the age in question. This differentiates between

young women who attended college only briefly

and those who completed more years of higher

education. This control attenuates but does not

eliminate the effects of the joint events. The

coefficients suggest that living independently

reinforces the lessons learned at college, pointing

to the socializing effect of time spent with other

students outside the classroom, away from parental

control and influence.

The other panels of Table 5 show the joint

measures of college-going and non-family living

described above for the other outcome measures.

These coefficients suggest that both college

attendance and non-family living affect the magni-

tude of attitude change, whether or not these occur

together. These patterns are not always fully

consistent; in general, however, both those who

lived at home while attending college and then

lived away (a relatively small group), and those

who lived away at college showed more change

than others on the Family factor analysis scores.

As before, adding educational attainment attenu-

ates but does not eliminate these relationships.

The final hypothesis is related to the importance

of including a Time 1 control measuring a given

attitude prior to any experience of non-family

living. One could argue that the relationship we

observe between attitudes and plans and non-

family living arises because those who grew up

with the most non-familial views may be more



12/15

ONAMLYLVNG55

Table 6. Effects of Non-Family Living on Attitudes and Expectations About Family Roles at Time 2 With

and Without the Inclusion of a Baseline Measure

Work Plans for Age 35

ge 20 Age 22 Age 24

Wthout Tm I 110** 120 068

WthTm 1 101** 083 042

Attitudes toward Famly Size Sex-Role Attitudes

Mothers' Working Expected Ideal Family Jobs

Wthout Tm 1 .995**-.211 - .084 .192**.114

WthTm 1 .979**-.225**-.066 .161**.112*

likely than others to live away from home. This

potential problem arises for all analyses where the

initial attitude measure may have occurred after

some experience with non-family living, as is the

case with sex-role scores. If so, the relationship

between non-family living and non-familial atti-

tudes that we observe could be spurious and only

reflect this relationship with the omitted variable.

Our controls for early attitudes, measured prior to

any non-family living, eliminate this possibility for

those outcomes for which we have this baseline;

these are work plans for age 35 and attitudes

toward mothers' working for young women. Both

of these models show the hypothesized effect,

providing strong tests of our central proposition.

These models also allow us to determine the extent

of the strength of the association between non-

family living and early attitudes, and hence, the

likely extent of specification bias in the analyses

without Time 1 controls.

To test our reasoning, we re-estimated all the

young women's models in Tables 3 and 4,

eliminating the initial measure of the dependent

variable. The resulting coefficients for non-family

living are presented in Table 6. Comparison with

the coefficients for non-family living in Tables 3

and 4 shows that adding or deleting the initial

measure makes little difference in the conclusions;

generally the results for non-family living without

controls for the initial measure are slightly stronger

than those with controls, but these differences are

quite small. In only one case, expected family size,

does adding or deleting the initial measure change

the significance of non-family living. Given the

strong relationships between the initial measure

and the later one shown in Tables 3 and 4, it is

clear that including the initial measure improves

the overall fit of the model; however, it does not

eliminate the effects of non-family living.

As a second test of this hypothesis, regression

models were estimated with the non-family living

measure at Time 2 as the dependent variable and

the Time 1 attitudes or work plans variable

included as an explanatory variable. All other

explanatory variables were retained as measured at

Time 2, which allowed us to isolate the effect the

attitudinal measure alone has on the propensity to

live away from home.'3 These results, in Table 7,

show that only the initial work plans variable has a

significant effect on the subsequent propensity for

non-family living-and only for age 22 or later.

The other attitude scales had no effect on

non-family living. These results corroborate those

in Table 6 that show that the percentage change in

the non-family living coefficient is relatively

small, except for the models for work plans at age

22 and age 24, where the coefficients increase 45

to 62 percent when the Time 1 baseline measure is

omitted.

These results provide strong support for our

hypothesis that living away during young adult-

hood is not highly selective with respect to initial

attitudes regarding values or belief systems. Those

with the least family-oriented views to begin with

are not substantially more or less likely to live

away from their parents during the transition to

adulthood, so that these and other analysis of the

effects of non-family living on attitudes and

behavior should not be unduly concerned about

issues of selectivity. However, there is indication

that some selectivity may exist with respect to

expressions of intentions or plans, if these plans

may produce actions that affect living arrange-

ments. In our analysis, specific work plans for age

35 might well be expected to interact with living

arrangements more than judgments regarding

appropriate familial sex roles. In this case, it is

prudent to include a baseline measure, which we

have done in this analysis.

DISCUSSION

We argued earlier in this paper that living away

from home prior to marriage changes young adults'

attitudes, expectations, and plans away from

13 For example, measuring marital status at age 20 in

the work plans model adjusts for the effect marriage had

on the proportion of years lived away from home between

age 17 and 20. If explanatory variables were measured at

Time 1 when all women were single, the effects of the

attitudinal measure would be confounded with the effects

of marriage on the non-family living variable.



13/15

52 AMRCANSOCOLOGCA REVEW

Table 7. Effects of Time 1 Measure on Non-Family

Living Variable at Time 2

me 1 Masure Coefficient Tme 2

Wrk Plans-age 17 .017 age 20

Wrk Plans-age 17 .052** age 22

Wrk Plans-age 17 .090** age 24

Attitudes, Mothers

Workng 1968 0011972

Sex-role Attitudes,

Famly 1972 008 1978

Sex-role Attitudes,

Jobs, 1972 001 1978

family and toward individual concerns. Our results

support this hypothesis consistently, indicating that

young women who lived independently became

more likely to plan for employment, lowered their

expected family size, became more accepting of

employment of mothers, and became more non-

traditional on sex roles in the family than those

who lived with their parents. We found much

weaker effects of non-family living in the tests we

could perform for young men. Our results suggest

that personal plans and expectations respond in the

expected way to experiences in non-family living,

but that some dimensions of ideals and global

attitudes change as a result of this experience, as

well. We also find evidence that living away from

home reinforces the effects of attending college on

young women's attitudes, expectations and plans.

Given these results, it is important to learn more

about why non-family living should have such an

effect on attitudes about new family formation and

the kinds of families likely to be formed. We

suggest the following possibilities. First, living

away from home lessens parental control over their

children's activities and may weaken the link

between parents' values, attitudes, and behavior

and those of their children. Young adults in their

own apartment are freed from parental curfews and

supervision of their friends and behavior, can

manage their own household in the way that they

choose, and may have a sexual freedom impossible

in their parents' house. Second, experience in

independent non-family living may equip young

adults with new social and domestic skills (such as

housekeeping, maintenance of a dwelling unit or

car, household finance, health care, and entertain-

ing). Living away from home may give both young

men and women the self-confidence that they can

get along without a family and may enable them to

acquire the skills that they need to maintain their

independence as long as they wish. Third,

non-family living potentially exposes young adults

to a wider variety of experiences and influences

than those encountered while they live with their

parents. These may cause individuals to change

their plans and expectations for themselves, and

their views of appropriate behavior for men and

women, in general. We do not test any of these

possible mechanisms directly, but our results

suggest that such tests might prove a fruitful

avenue for further research.

Previous research on the development and

revision of sex-role attitudes has focused on

education, employment (Spitze, 1978; Dambrot et

al., 1983; Morgan and Walker, 1983), marriage,

becoming a parent, and divorce (Spitze and Waite,

1981). We find that education and employment are

associated with less family-oriented attitudes and

plans, but we see effects of current marital status

primarily for sex-role attitudes. Married women

hold less traditional views on the economic

benefits to the family of women's employment,

and divorced women and working mothers are

more liberal on the appropriate division of roles

within the family. Non-family living, by contrast,

seems to have broader effects than marital status,

with coefficients sometimes larger than those of

employment and education. Non-family living is a

previously ignored but potentially important expe-

rience in the transition to adulthood, especially as

it influences young adults' attitudes and plans for

their own lives.

One particularly significant result of this re-

search is the finding that the omission of Time 1

controls has little effect on measuring the impact of

non-family living on later orientations toward work

and family life. This provides increased confidence

that results obtained previously that show the

impact of non-family living on the likelihood of

marriage were not biased by the omission of some

underlying anti-family attitude among those who

both live away from parents early in adulthood and

are also unlikely to marry. It also opens the way to

research on other possible sequelae of non-family

residence in early adulthood, such as marital

dissolution, or less traditional assignments of tasks

within marriage, allowing greater range in the

analysis of the forces leading to change in marriage

and the family in the late twentieth century.

These changes in the nature of the family, many

of which we discussed earlier, have altered some

of the bases on which traditional, gender-based

divisions of labor rested. These divisions may have

served some important functions under earlier

conditions (Marwell, 1975). But as Marini (1984)

has argued, norms about the transition to adulthood

tend to reflect behavior, as well as affect it, and

thus may change as behavior changes. The shifts in

individual attitudes, plans, and expectations that

our findings link with experiences with non-family

living may be a first step in the process of

alteration of norms. Thus, our finding that

non-family living influenced all our measures of

behavioral plans and evaluations, but did not affect

some indicators of global ideals, should not be

interpreted as showing that non-family living may



14/15

NONAMLYLVNG553

only have a transient effect, one with impacts only

on those experiencing it. For if Marini is correct,

the increase in non-family living, by changing

plans relating to male and female roles in the

family, may presage larger shifts than we have

already observed in norms about family life.

APPENDIX

Attitudes towards mothers' working

Now I'd like you to think about a family where there is

a mother, a father who works full-time, and several

children under school age. A trusted relative who can

care for the children lives nearby. In this family situation,

how do you feel about the mother taking a full-time job

outside the home-

a. If it is absolutely necessary to make ends meet?

b. If she wants to and her husband agrees?

c. If she prefers to work, but her husband doesn't

particularly like it?

Sex-role attitudes scores #1 and #2, 1972

a. Modern conveniences permit a wife to work

without neglecting her family.

b. A woman's place is in the home, not in the office

or shop.

c. A job provides a wife with interesting outside

contacts.

d. wife who carries out her full family responsibilities

doesn't have time for outside employment.

e. A working wife feels more useful than one who

doesn't hold a job.

f. The employment of wives leads to more juvenile

delinquency.

g. Working wives help to raise the general standard of

living.

h. Working wives lose interest in their home and

families.

i. Employment of both parents is necessary to keep up

with the high cost of living.

Sex-role attitudes scores #1 and #2, 1978

The 1978 series includes items a, b, d, e, f, and i. It also

includes the questions listed below.

j. It is much better for everyone concerned if the man

is the achiever outside the home and the woman

takes care of the home and family.

k. Men should share the work around the house with

women, such as doing dishes, cleaning, and so

forth.

1. A working mother can establish just as warm and

secure a relationship with her child as a woman who

doesn't work.

m. Women are much happier if they stay at home and

take care of their children.

n. A woman should not let bearing and rearing

children stand in the way of a career if she wants it.

Items a and c had no relationship with either dimension in

the 1972 scales, and were dropped; items a and k were

deleted from the 1978 scores for the same reason. Items

e, g and i loaded highly on score #2 (jobs), and the

remaining items loaded highly on score #1 (family).

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nonfamily living and the erosion of traditional family orientations among young adults

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