Effects of Community Characteristics on Early Life Transitions of Canadian Youth

Zenaida R. Ravanera, University of Western Ontario
Fernando Rajulton, University of Western Ontario
Thomas Burch, University of Victoria

While our earlier studies focused on the effects of individual and parental traits on the timing and trajectories of early life course events, this paper looks at the impact of community characteristics. Effects on the timing of school completion, start of regular work, and home-leaving of Canadians born between 1971-1980 are examined using a data set that merged 1995 General Social Survey on the Families with data derived from enumeration areas of the 1996 Census. Hazards models of ages at transition are used to analyze the effects of communities while controlling for family and individual-level variables. We expect the results to show that community-level characteristics indicative of social capital, in addition to community affluence and opportunity structures, would have significant effect on the timing of transition to adulthood. The mechanisms by which the effects operate are explored. (For an example of our work on early life transition see: http://www.ssc.uwo.ca/sociology/popstudies/dp/dp98-7.pdf )