Tag Archives | Paternal Incarceration

Shattered Dreams: Paternal Incarceration, Youth Expectations, and the Intergenerational Transmission of Disadvantage

Garrett Baker

Sociological Science September 19, 2023
10.15195/v10.a20


Children’s expectations and aspirations have a substantial effect on a variety of life course outcomes, including their health, education, and earnings. However, little research to date has considered empirically how expectations and aspirations are shaped by adverse events—such as experiencing a parent be incarcerated. In this article, I leverage Add Health’s retrospective parental incarceration questions to employ an innovative analytic strategy that accounts for selection bias and unobserved heterogeneity above and beyond typical observational methods. Results indicate that paternal incarceration is associated with one-fourth to one-third of a standard deviation lower youth expectations and aspirations, and these results are robust to various methods and specifications. Given that paternal incarceration is both common and disproportionately experienced by disadvantaged youth, the large magnitude and robust nature of these results reveal an important pathway through which mass incarceration has contributed to the intergenerational transmission of inequality in the U.S. in recent decades.
Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Garrett Baker: Duke University Department of Sociology and Sanford School of Public Policy
E-mail: garrett.baker@duke.edu

Acknowledgements: I am especially grateful to Chris Wildeman for his immense patience and continued guidance as this article evolved over the years. I would also like to thank Brielle Bryan, Anna Gassman-Pines, Sarah Komisarow, Martin Ruef, and Steve Vaisey for their thoughtful comments on earlier drafts of this article. Participants at the 2022 American Sociological Association (ASA) Annual Meeting, the 2022 Population Association of America (PAA) Annual Meeting, and the 2022 American Society of Criminology (ASC) Annual Meeting also provided helpful feedback. This research uses data from Add Health, funded by grant P01 HD31921 (Harris) from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), with cooperative funding from 23 other federal agencies and foundations. Add Health is currently directed by Robert A. Hummer and funded by the National Institute on Aging cooperative agreements U01 AG071448 (Hummer) and U01AG071450 (Aiello and Hummer) at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Add Health was designed by J. Richard Udry, Peter S. Bearman, and Kathleen Mullan Harris at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

  • Citation: Baker, Garrett. 2023. “Shattered Dreams: Paternal Incarceration, Youth Expectations, and the Intergenerational Transmission of Disadvantage.” Sociological Science 10: 559-584.
  • Received: February 21, 2023
  • Accepted: March 27, 2023
  • Editors: Arnout van de Rijt, Peter Bearman
  • DOI: 10.15195/v10.a20


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