Primary Submission Category: Life-course/developmental
The Spill-over Effects of Childhood Health on Siblings’ Educational Attainment
Authors: Han Liu
Presenting Author: Han Liu*
Siblings are a very important, but understudied, part of family relations and home environments that can affect children’s status attainment. Prior research has established an association between status attainment and structural features of the sibling group (e.g., sibship size), but largely overlooks the characteristics of each sibling. To fill this gap in the literature, this study examines how children’s health affects their siblings’ education with data from the NLSY79 Child/YA and multilevel dyadic models. This study will make several contributions to the literature on stratification, families, and the life course. First, it contextualizes the production and reproduction of health-related inequality in families. Second, this study bridges two fields of research in the sociological literature on families, one on health and family ties and the other one on family dynamics and inequality. In the context of the second demographic transition, it is particularly important to delineate the interrelatedness of families’ impact in different areas of social lives. Third, this study treats the accumulation of advantages and disadvantages as a multilevel process and emphasizes that research on early life adversities should account for the “linked lives” of family members. Fourth, this project uses multilevel dyadic models in an innovative way that is different from most prior sociological studies. While prior quantitative dyadic studies typically use actor-partner interdependence models, this study shows that dyadic models can be adapted to include more family members, deal with more complex data structures, and study a wider range of research topics.