Pathways to Young Adulthood Among Youth from Rural and Small Towns

Introduction: Young adults from small towns differ in an important way from urban young adults. They are more likely to move away after high school, often because of limited educational and occupational opportunities in small towns. Those who remain tend to have fewer socioeconomic resources and educational or occupational skills and may move more quickly into adult roles, like full-time employment and family formation. However, there are few empirical studies of the transition to adulthood of small town youth. This paper identifies predominant role combinations at age 21 in a longitudinal sample of young adults from small and rural towns. It examines whether young adult stayers move more quickly into young adult roles. As the timing and sequencing of role transitions has been shown by prior research to differ for males and females, gender differences in role combinations are also explored.

Methods:The panel of 4407 young adults was followed from grade 5 to age 21 as part of a randomized trial of the Communities That Care prevention system in 24 small towns (average population 15,000) in 7 states (92% retention at age 21). At age 21 52% had moved, but 48% remained in original study communities. Latent class analysis (LCA) was used to identify common combinations of role transitions at age 21 across multiple domains (e.g., education, work, parenthood), separately by gender. Associations between moving/staying and latent role combinations were analyzed using generalized mixed regression models accounting for nested data. Analyses controlled for community characteristics and individual factors measured in adolescence.

Results: The LCA identified 4 latent role combinations: 1) living with parents, working, not in a relationship/dating, 2) college students, 3) full-time employed, married/cohabiting, and 4) young parent. Females were more likely than males to be attending college (class 2: 43% v. 34%) and to have transitioned to full-time employment (class 3: 15% vs. 6%) but were less likely to be living with parents (class 1: 28% v. 50%). Males and females were about equally likely to be a young parent (class 4: 13% vs. 11%).  Contrary to our hypothesis, stayers did not move more quickly into young adulthood than movers, as indicated by membership in classes 3 (7% vs. 9%) and 4 (10% vs. 10%), but, as expected, stayers were less likely than movers to be in the college student class (class 2: 34% v. 40%). They were also more likely to be living with parents (class 1: 39% v. 30%).

Conclusions:   The study suggests that, by age 21, rural stayers had not moved more quickly into young adult roles, but, in fact, were slower to start the transition to young adulthood, indicated by their greater likelihood of living with parents. To identify appropriate supports for rural young adults it will be important to extend analyses further into the 20s.