We request funds to continue a prospective, longitudinal, adoption study of transitions to adulthood. The proposed research aims to increase knowledge about the important familial determinants of children's social and economic well being as they make the transition from adolescence into young adulthood. Specific hypotheses address individual and familial influences on educational attainment, occupational attainment, and family-formation choices, and how the quality of early family relationships shapes adult parent-child relationships. We address these questions in the context of a longitudinal adoption design, which offers an opportunity to carry out powerful tests of socialization and social-psychological theories. The adoption design allows us to test familial determinants of adult outcomes independently of genetic effects. Further, we capitalize on the resources of the Colorado Adoption Project (CAP), a long-term, longitudinal adoption study of 245 adoptive families and 245 nonadoptive families. The CAP children, their siblings, and their home environments have been assessed repeatedly since infancy using a broad, multivariate battery of social, environmental, and behavioral measures. We propose to continue longitudinal assessment of the CAP probands, their siblings, and their parents, as the CAP children continue to make the transition into young adulthood (reach age 25-30). The proposed research is innovative, both in the field of behavioral genetics and the field of social demography, in that it brings behavioral genetic methods to bear on social demographic phenomena and on the study of life-course developmental processes. This study promises to advance our understanding of how family factors influence adult outcomes, and to enrich socialization theories and models of life-course development.

R01HD036773

1998-08-01

2009-05-31