Objective: Student loan debt has become a growing crisis. Considering that women are more likely than men to take on student loans and more likely to take on larger amounts, we examine whether the effects of student loans on young adults' mental health and substance use differ by gender. Participants: We used the National Longitudinal Survey of…

Given the questionnaire design and the nature of the problem, partially ordered data that are neither completely ordered nor completely unordered are frequently encountered in social, behavioral, and medical studies. However, early developments in partially ordered data analysis are very limited and restricted only to cross-sectional data. In this…

This study is the first to examine adolescent cigarette report stability over 10 years. Six waves of data were utilized from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. This study examined internal/logical consistency and external consistency. Report stability was higher for lifetime use reports than the age of onset reports. Wave-by-wave…

This study introduces an item response theory-zero-inflated Poisson (IRT-ZIP) model to investigate psychometric properties of multiple items and predict individuals' latent trait scores for multivariate zero-inflated count data. In the model, two link functions are used to capture two processes of the zero-inflated count data. Item parameters are…

Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 (N = 4,050), we consider the relationship between the timing of family formation and positive changes in health behavior. Theories that predict both positive and negative associations are tested. The findings suggest that both mechanisms operate and that the direction of the…

This paper presents an exploratory analysis using NLSY97 data of the relationship between the likelihood of school continuation and the choices of whether to smoke or drink. We demonstrate that in the United States as of the late 1990s, smoking in 11th-grade was a uniquely powerful predictor of whether the student finished high school, and if so…

This report uses data from the 1983 through 1988 rounds of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY) to provide information about prenatal, infant, and child health. Objectives of the report are to present statistics which should be of value to maternal and child health policymakers, and to provide NLSY users with baseline information about…