Family and social transitions to adulthood of young men: the case of Mexico

Gabriela Mejia Pailles, London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE)

In past years, there has been a number of important contributions in our understanding of the process from adolescence to adulthood. However, the discipline still has gaps that need to be filled, especially in methodological approaches to study the interrelationship between events involved in the passageway to adulthood. Applying event history techniques to retrospective data of the 2000 Mexican National Youth Survey, the objective of the paper is to examine the process involving social and family transitions in different groups of young men in contemporary Mexico, and to explore the main associations between other key life course events that lead to different trajectories. The paper argues that despite the diversity of Mexican society and the recent gains in educational attainment, patterns of social transitions are experienced at various paces by different social groups, whereas family transitions occur rather uniform among different socioeconomic clusters of young men.