Healthy behaviors including adequate exercise and sleep, eating breakfast, maintaining a healthy weight, and not smoking or binge drinking inhibit chronic disease. However, little is known about how these behaviors change across life course stages, or the social factors that shape healthy behaviors over time. I use multilevel growth models and waves I-III of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (N=10,775) to evaluate relationships between adolescents’ psychosocial resources, social support, and family of origin characteristics during adolescence and healthy behavior trajectories through young adulthood (ages 13-24). I find that healthy behaviors decline dramatically during the transition to young adulthood. Social support resources, such as school connectedness and support from parents, as well as living with non-smoking parents, are associated with higher levels of healthy behaviors across adolescence and adulthood. Social support from friends is associated with lower engagement in these behaviors, as is living in a single parent family or with a smoking parent during adolescence. Findings indicate that psychosocial, social support, and family of origin resources during adolescence exert a persistent, though generally not cumulative, influence on healthy behavior trajectories through young adulthood.

We contribute to research on the relationships between gender, work and health by using longitudinal, theoretically driven models of mothers’ diverse work pathways and adjusting for unequal selection into these pathways. Using the NLSY79 (N=2,540), we find full-time, continuous employment following a first birth is associated with significantly better health at age forty than part-time work, paid work interrupted by unemployment, and unpaid work in the home. Part-time workers with little unemployment report significantly better health at age forty than mothers experiencing persistent unemployment. These relationships remain after accounting for the unequal selection of more advantaged mothers into full-time, continuous employment, suggesting full-time workers benefit from cumulating advantages across the life course and reiterating the need to disentangle health benefits associated with work from those associated with pre-pregnancy characteristics.

Despite numerous changes in women’s employment in the latter half of the 20th century, women’s employment continues to be uneven and stalled. Drawing from data on women’s weekly work hours in the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY79), we identify significant inequality in women’s labor force experiences across adulthood. We find two pathways of stable fulltime work for women, three pathways of part-time employment, and a pathway of unpaid labor. A majority of women follow one of the two fulltime work pathways, while fewer than 10 percent follow a pathway of unpaid labor. Our findings provide evidence of the lasting influence of work-family conflict and early socio-economic advantages and disadvantages on women’s work pathways. Indeed, race, poverty, educational attainment, and early family characteristics significantly shaped women’s work careers. Work-family opportunities and constraints also were related to women’s work hours, as were a woman’s gendered beliefs and expectations. We conclude that women’s employment pathways are a product of both their resources and changing social environment as well as individual agency. Significantly, we point to social stratification, gender ideologies, and work-family constraints, working in concert, as key explanations for how women are “tracked” onto work pathways from an early age.

Past research has consistently documented the positive relationship between a transition to marriage and psychological well-being. In this study, we separate the depressed from the nondepressed to assess whether the benefits marriage has for psychological well-being depend on premarital depression. We also examine whether the effect of marital quality in moderating the psychological consequences of marriage differs for the depressed and the nondepressed. Results indicate that, on average, those who were depressed prior to marrying report larger psychological gains from marriage than those who were not depressed. The role of marital quality in moderating the effect of marriage on psychological well-being is similar for previously depressed and previously nondepressed respondents. These findings call into question the assumption that marriage is always a good choice for all individuals. What appear to be strong average benefits of marriage are actually highly dependent on a range of individual, interpersonal, and structural characteristics.

Despite high rates of nonmarital childbearing in the U.S., little is known about the health of women who have nonmarital births. We use data from the NLSY79 to examine differences in age 40 self-assessed health between women who had a premarital birth and those whose first birth occurred within marriage. We then differentiate women with a premarital first birth according to their subsequent union histories and estimate the effect of marrying or cohabiting versus remaining never-married on midlife self-assessed health, paying particular attention to the paternity status of the mother's partner and the stability of marital unions. To partially address selection bias, we employ multivariate propensity score techniques. Results suggest that premarital childbearing is negatively associated with midlife health for white and black (but not Hispanic) women. We find no evidence that these negative health consequences of nonmarital childbearing are mitigated by either marriage or cohabitation for black women. For other women, only enduring marriage to the biological father is associated with better health than remaining unpartnered.