Methodology

originally teenage mothers. If so, the rise of nonmarital childbearing among older women need not necessarily imply that nonmarital childbearing among teenagers has become any less of a problem. Unfortunately, the cross-sectional na-ture of vital statistics data does not allow them to be used to answer these questions, since births are described only in terms of a mother’s current age and marital status. Without marital and fertility histories, the picture is incomplete at best, and many in-teresting questions cannot be answered. In this research note, we use recently re-leased data files from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), a nationally rep-resentative sample of U. S. households and individuals, to describe nonmarital child-bearing in the 1980s. We examine non-marital childbearing among women aged 25 and older, with special attention to their prior marital and fertility experience