Family context and adoption of risky lifestyles: a study of English adolescents

This chapter presents the results of our empirical analysis using the recent data from the Longitudinal Survey of Young People in England (LSYPE), which is a panel study of young people aged between 13 and 14 in 2004 that is annually repeated. We develop an economic-theoretical framework with applied health econometric methods and use binary regression models to explain the probability of reporting a risky form of lifestyle at age 18 to 19. We consider seven risky forms of lifestyles, namely early sexual intercourse, teenage parenthood, early smoking, alcohol use, frequency of getting drunk, cannabis smoking and drug use. We undertake a hierarchical explanatory analysis where we include a larger vector of independent variables at each of the three steps of the analysis. This multi-step analysis enables us to understand the underlying mechanisms of the influence of family structure, especially lone-parent family, on the likelihood of adopting a range of unhealthy lifestyles in adolescence and whether family structure has a direct effect on those lifestyles, or an indirect effect, through its influence on other adolescents’ social characteristics.