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Motivated by long-standing debates between abstinence proponents and sceptics, we examine how socio-economic factors influence premarital first births via: (i) age at first sexual intercourse and (ii) the risk of a premarital first birth following the onset of sexual activity. Factors associated with an earlier age at first intercourse will imply more premarital first births owing to increased exposure to risk, but many of these same factors will also be associated with higher risks of a premarital first birth following onset. Our analyses confirm previous findings that women from disadvantaged backgrounds are younger at first intercourse and have higher premarital first-birth risks than women from more advantaged backgrounds. However, differences in onset timing have a strikingly smaller influence on premarital first-birth probabilities than do differences in post-onset risks. Our findings thus suggest that premarital first births result primarily from differences in post-onset risk behaviours as opposed to differences in onset timing.

In the 1st-ever use of event-history analysis to investigate discourse processes quantitatively, this study recasts understanding of discourse in terms of the (a) antecedents and (b) consequences of discourse participant "moves" as they (c) affect the inertia of the discourse and accordingly structure unfolding discourse processes. The method is used to compute the probabilities of the effects of particular discourse moves on subsequent discourse patterns and to measure and systematically contrast static (macrosocial) and dynamic (microsocial) conditions prompting and sustaining dialogic discourse. Theoretically, the authors draw on Russian scholar Mikhail Bakhtin's epistemological distinctions between monologic and dialogic discourse to identify pedagogically rich sequences of teacher-student interaction as dialogic spells and discussion, which the authors' previous work has shown to contribute to achievement. Empirically, the authors examine data collected in hundreds of observations of more than 200 8t...