Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of tables and figures
- Preface
- 1 Reassessing adolescent parenthood
- 2 Experience in adulthood
- 3 Pathways to success in adulthood
- 4 The children's experience
- 5 The intersecting life courses of adolescent mothers and their children
- 6 The life course of adolescent mothers: implications for public policy
- Appendixes
- A Life-history calendar
- B Reliability
- C Analysis of sample attrition for bias
- D Description of data sets used for comparison of socioeconomic variables with Baltimore data set in Table 2.2
- E Methods and procedures used in Chapter 3
- F Description and details of multivariate analysis reported in Chapter 4 and 5
- G Procedure for computing summary statistics in Chapter 6
- Bibliography
- Index
G - Procedure for computing summary statistics in Chapter 6
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 August 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of tables and figures
- Preface
- 1 Reassessing adolescent parenthood
- 2 Experience in adulthood
- 3 Pathways to success in adulthood
- 4 The children's experience
- 5 The intersecting life courses of adolescent mothers and their children
- 6 The life course of adolescent mothers: implications for public policy
- Appendixes
- A Life-history calendar
- B Reliability
- C Analysis of sample attrition for bias
- D Description of data sets used for comparison of socioeconomic variables with Baltimore data set in Table 2.2
- E Methods and procedures used in Chapter 3
- F Description and details of multivariate analysis reported in Chapter 4 and 5
- G Procedure for computing summary statistics in Chapter 6
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
The analysis in Chapter 3 was designed to show the causal paths by which independent variables influenced the outcomes of interest. In some cases a variable's influence was almost totally direct e.g.; there were no significant indirect effects. Other variables had weak direct effects but several strong indirect effects operating through other variables included in the model. Here we are interested in the relative magnitude of effects, both direct and indirect. Which variable has the greatest effect on these outcomes? To answer this question, we evaluated the change in the proportion on welfare (the proportion economically secure or having three or more children) that resulted from altering the characteristics of the population. For instance, given the observed proportion whose parents had low education, what proportion do we expect to be on welfare? If we now assume everyone's parents have low education and then in turn assume no one's parents have low education, we have a series of proportions that indicate the predicted impact of this variable. Such proportions are graphically presented in Chapter 6 for variables included in the analysis.
We chose to show the estimated effects in proportions because we felt they would be more meaningful to a broader audience than changes in odds or log odds. Since our prediction equation estimates individual likelihoods and not sample proportions, we transformed each coefficient by multiplying it by [P ✻ (1 − P)], where P is the mean of the dependent variable (see Hanushek and Jackson, 1977).
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- Adolescent Mothers in Later Life , pp. 184 - 186Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1987