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Census study: whites less likely
than blacks to live with extended family From Eurekalert White
households changed dramatically during the last half of the century. Fewer
and fewer adult children and elderly parents moved in with married
couples, making white persons less likely than black persons to live in
extended-family households, according to a new Brown-led study. The
research, published in a recent issue of Demography, looks at
information on 166,000 households, controlling for income, from the Unmarried
adults with or without children who are living with no related adults are
defined as living in simple households. A complex household is defined as
a household that contains a family in which there are two or more adults
who are related but not married hence they could be expected to live
separately. The most common modern scenario 78 percent of complex
households in 1990 is adult children who live with their parents. The
broad shift in living arrangements in the Differences
in intergenerational living between white and black families began in the
late 1960s, when white families experienced significant declines in
intergenerational living while black families remained largely the same,
according to the researchers. In
1940, unmarried black adults were much less likely to live in complex
family households than were unmarried white adults, with barely 50 percent
of blacks living in such families, compared with nearly 70 percent of
whites. By 1990, 39 percent of unmarried blacks, but less than 30 percent
of unmarried whites, lived in complex family households. While
most current researchers on black-white family differences had assumed the
greater complexity among black families was long-standing, these results
suggest that interpretation is unlikely, said Frances K. Goldscheider,
professor of sociology at Brown, who co-authored the study with Regina M.
Bures of the University of Albany. The higher level of family extension
that typifies black families is both relatively new and a trend that is
not just limited to single-parent families. This
study found the While
census data does not include attitudinal measures to help researchers
interpret the patterns and changes, previous research on the late
twentieth-century living arrangements has shown that greater income has
strongly reduced the likelihood that individuals will share housing.
However the increase in simple households, which most researchers have
interpreted as being related to a growing individualism and a taste for
privacy, is apparently much more characteristic of the living arrangements
of whites than blacks from 1940 to1990, according to this study. Determining
changing family patterns and the attitudes driving them is particularly
challenging when there are racial or ethnic differences that can
politicize the data, Goldscheider said. The question is: Are families
important? she said. We have an individualistic society and yet many
of us have experienced help within our families and were grateful to be
able to give help. Further
research is needed to answer questions posed by the differences, such as
how much of the difference reflects the higher mortality among blacks,
which may leave young adults with fewer older relatives than were
available to whites. The
study was supported by the Brown University Population and
Copyright
© 2002 Global Action on Aging |