Social Class and Health Lifestyles across the Transition to Adulthood

• In Event: 067 - Section on Aging and the Life Course Refereed Roundtable Session
  In Refereed Roundtable 100min: Table 01. Transition to Adulthood: Socioeconomic Attainment

Abstract

Despite the importance of social class and lifestyles in foundational sociological research, we know little about how or when U.S. adults come to adopt lifestyles that reflect their social class. We propose and test two opposing theoretical approaches describing the association between lifestyle and class in adulthood. The first, “development of lifestyle class coherence,” argues that a class coherent lifestyle emerges in adulthood and is an important marker of adulthood. The second, “constant lifestyle class coherence,” posits a continuous, constant relationship between social class and lifestyle across the life course. We evaluate these theories through identifying health lifestyles across the transition to adulthood and comparing their associations with concurrent social class. We use data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health), which offers information on health behaviors and social class in adolescence (ages 15-17) and young adulthood (ages 27-31). Latent class analysis produced eight adolescent health lifestyles and five young adult health lifestyles. Preliminary results indicate that social class is more strongly related to health lifestyles in young adulthood than in adolescence. Further analyses (to be conducted in the coming months) will check the robustness of these findings and analyze the extent to which social class and health lifestyles are related among those who exhibit more or fewer markers of adulthood. The findings of this study contribute to our understanding of how social differences develop over time.

Authors

• Elizabeth Lawrence, University of North Carolina

• Stefanie Mollborn, University of Colorado Boulder

• Fred C. Pampel, University of Colorado