Teenage Family Life, Life Chances, Lifestyles and Health : A Comparison of Two Contemporary Cohorts

The main aim of this paper is to compare the association of family structure with outcomes for young people in living in the West of Scotland (the Twenty-07 Study, N=1009) with their contemporaries living in Britain (the 1970 British Cohort Study N=11615) in the mid-1980s. A wide range of measures were considered, using educational achievement to represent life-chances, smoking and drinking to represent life styles and psychological well-being (GHQ), and physical symptoms to represent health. The associations of family structure with these outcomes is estimated for each Study at three levels: the overall association, that after controlling for gender and family income, and, finally, after controlling in addition for family processes. Odds ratios with 95 percent confidence intervals are reported for those living in lone-parent households and reconstituted households each compared with intact families. Similar results are reported for those living in families disrupted by the death of a parent and for those whose parents had separated. No statistically significant differences (at the 5 percent level) were found between the two studies in the adjusted models. The associations of family structure and reason for family disruption with outcomes for fifteen/sixteen-year-olds are similar in the West of Scotland to those in Britain as a whole