Explaining racial and ethnic differences in birth outcomes: the effect of household structure and resources.

Attempting to explain the relatively favorable outcomes of births to Hispanics--especially Mexican-descent--women this study examines the effects of income and household structure on the birth weight of infants born to white black and Hispanic mothers. In addition to income and household structure the study also considers the effects of maternal behaviors proximate biological characteristics and sociodemographic and attitudinal covariates. The data used in the study comes from the 1988 National Maternal and Infant Health Survey (NMIHS). This data reveals that the low birth weight rate for Hispanic infants born that year was 6.2% compared to 5.6% for white and 13.1% for black babies. And among Hispanic subgroups Mexican-descent infants had a low birth weight rate of 5.6% while Puerto Rican infants had a rate of 9.4%. Contrary to expectations the NMIHS data shows that the tendency of Hispanics to live in larger households and to have close kin support networks does not explain their relative favorable birth outcomes. In fact it appears that household structure and income plays a more important role in the birth outcomes of blacks. Interestingly Mexican-descent women are actually less likely to live in an extended household than Puerto-Rican and black women. The research shows that birth weights of Mexican-descent infants differ only slightly to that of whites a finding that supports literature that shows that Mexican-descent mothers are less likely to smoke during pregnancy and begin pregnancy with greater nutritional adequacy than other mothers.