Adolescent outcomes and opportunities in a Canadian province: looking at siblings and neighbors

Abstract

Background: Well-organized administrative data with large numbers of cases (building on linked files from several government departments) and a population registry facilitate new studies of population health and child development. Analyses of family relationships and a number of outcomes--educational achievement, health, teen pregnancy, and receipt of income assistance--are relatively easy to conduct using several birth cohorts. Looking both at means/proportions and at sibling correlations enriches our study of opportunity and well-being in late adolescence. With observational research possibly exaggerating the causal effects of risk factors, sibling comparisons involving individuals sharing both many family characteristics and many genes help deal with such criticisms.

Methods: This paper uses a rich dataset from one Canadian province (Manitoba) covering a wide range of geographical areas (cities to rural regions). Influences on opportunity and well-being are analyzed looking at both means/proportions and sibling correlations. We measure a variety of outcomes that may reflect different causal influences. A creative application of linear programming advances the use of data on residential location.

Results: Predicting educational achievement using available variables was much easier than predicting adolescent health status (R-square of .200 versus R-square of .043). Low levels of educational achievement, high levels of teenage pregnancy, and high sibling correlations outside Winnipeg and within Winnipeg's lower income areas highlight inequalities across socioeconomic and geographic backgrounds. Stratifying our analyses by different variables, such as income quintiles, reveals differences in means and correlations within outcomes and across groups. Particular events--changes in mother's marital status and in place of residence--were associated with less favorable outcomes in late adolescence.

Conclusion: Our findings suggest a paradox: Canadian developmental outcomes through late adolescence appear quite similar to those in the United States, even though intergenerational mobility in Canada is closer to mobility in the Nordic countries than to that in the United States.

Figure 1

Manitoba Centre for Health Policy research repository. The research registry provides date of birth, sex, marital status, residential location (within Manitoba), date of entry in and departure from the province, and death information for essentially each Manitoba resident. To the extent possible, this information is compared with the Vital Statistics files. Information on each of the substantive files is provided in the Manitoba Centre for Health Policy website (http://umanitoba.ca/faculties/medicine/units/community_health_sciences/departmental_units/mchp/resources/repository/index.html).

Figure 2

Sibling - neighborhood designs. Within each family, siblings a and b are compared. Within each neighborhood, the two appropriate families are compared: the two sibling a’s with each other and the two sibling b’s with each other.