The Stability of Extended Family Living Arrangements: The Case of Mexican Immigrants and Mexican Americans

Jennifer Van Hook, Bowling Green State University
Jennifer E. Glick, Arizona State University

The formation and maintenance of extended family households is a dynamic process in which family members enter, exit or stay in the household based on economic need, life course events and personal preference. However, most work on extended family living arrangements, and all prior empirical work on the living arrangements of immigrants, has relied on cross-sectional data. Immigrants' high level of co-residence with extended kin is significant because extended families are widely thought to enhance well-being; recent changes in welfare and immigration policy reflect the assumption that immigrants are able to derive support from extended kin for sustained periods of time. In this paper, we model the stability of extended family living arrangements using longitudinal data available from the 1990, 1991, 1992, and 1993 panels of the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) to examine the social and economic determinants of entry into and stability of such living arrangements.