Multigenerational Educational Attainment and Women’s Mortality

• In Event: 439 - Regular Session. Population Health

Abstract

This study develops and tests a model of multigenerational educational attainment and women’s mortality. While developed separately, the long arm, personal attainment, and social foreground perspectives suggest a single, overarching process in which parent, personal, and adult child educational attainment provide unique health-related resources at various points in the life course. No single study, however, tests whether the attainment of multiple generations has a cumulative effect on women’s mortality. Using the National Longitudinal Survey of Mature Women (NLS-MW), a nationally representative sample with recently updated information on mortality, this paper examines the relationships between mortality and the educational attainment of three generations whose lives, when taken together, span the entirety of the twentieth century. Results indicate that adult child educational attainment is an important predictor of older women’s mortality risk, whereas parent, personal, and husband attainment appear to have no association with mortality after adjusting for adult child attainment and sociodemographic controls. An integration of these findings with prior research on mortality suggests a model of multigenerational attainment and mortality in which, as women grow older, the relative importance of each generation’s attainment for one’s survival shifts from past to future generations.

Authors

• Joseph Daniel Wolfe, University of Alabama at Birmingham

• Shawn Bauldry, Purdue University

• Eliza K. Pavalko, Indiana University

• Melissa Hardy, The Pennsylvania State University