Heterogeneidade na transição para a vida adulta no Brasil

Abstract

The transition to adulthood is an issue that has gained relevance as a research theme in the social sciences since the middle of the 20th century in response, mainly, to the profound transformations through which the family formation dynamics went through (Hogan e Astone, 1986). The timing of transition to adulthood is strongly determined by cultural, institutional, socioeconomic and demographic factors. Then, do different social groups, inserted in different social contexts, transits to adulthood at different timings? How does the transition differ between these groups? Answering these questions is the central objective of this dissertation. Starting from the theoretical framework presented by Modell, Furstenberg and Hershberg (1976), which delimits the beginning of adulthood as the moment when the individual goes through events that take him to assume roles interpreted by society as characteristic of adults (entry into the labor market, marriage, paternity/maternity and leaving home), this dissertation tries to quantify the weight of each of these events in the differential of the mean age to the transition to adulthood. The mean ages at transition were estimated for men and women in 1970, 1980, 1991, 2000 and 2010 and men and women of low, medium and high schooling in 2010 applying the Singular Mean Age at First Marriage method and Life Table method from the microdata of the Brazilian Census. The decomposition of the mean age differential is done following the methodology proposed by Arriaga (1984). The results show that there was a convergence of the mean age and the transition pattern of men and women to adulthood in Brazil and that this is due to the higher proportion of women transiting through entering the labor market instead of through family formation events. In the comparison between educational groups, the results show that the transition pattern of men and women is more similar among the group of higher education: older and strongly determined by entering the labor market. In the less educated groups, the transition was younger and more strongly determined by the formation of the first union and, mainly, the birth of the first child, a result that reflects the high incidence of adolescent fertility in Brazil.