IBS Seminar Series: Finding Jobs, Forming Families, and Stressing Out?

Adam Lippert

Title: Finding Jobs, Forming Families, and Stressing Out? Work, Family, and Stress among Young Adult Women in the US

Abstract: The transition to adulthood is increasingly characterized by complex paths into work and family, especially for women. How work and family combine to influence stress among young adult women is not well-understood. In this presentation, I describe how new extensions to latent class analysis (LCA) can help identify common combinations of work and family circumstances among young adult women and investigate implications for stress. Two stress measures are examined – perceived stress and a biomarker for stress-related immunity dysfunction, Epstein-Barr Viral (EBV) antibody titers. LCA models identify seven common combinations of work-family circumstances, ranging from well-compensated professional work in the absence of children to mothers without paid employment. Results from the BCH Step-3 extension to LCA show that perceived stress is higher among mothers and childfree women in unskilled work with low wages and decision-making freedom than their counterparts in skilled “white-collar” work with higher wages and decision-making freedom. These differences are attenuated after adjustments for several measures of poverty-related stress. EBV antibody titer values did not vary across the work-family typology. These findings suggest that the benefits of combining work and family may be limited to women of higher socioeconomic status, as prior research suggests.

Bio: Adam Lippert is a sociologist and demographer whose work focuses on three themes: (1) how work and family circumstances are associated with stress-related pathologies in young- and mid-adulthood; (2) how neighborhood and school contexts influence health; and (3) how economically-vulnerable families manage risks and protect their children’s health and development. He is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Colorado Denver.