The Effects of Teenage Work Quality on Delinquency
Open Access
- Author:
- Cundiff, Kelsey Lynn
- Graduate Program:
- Criminology
- Degree:
- Master of Arts
- Document Type:
- Master Thesis
- Date of Defense:
- May 04, 2016
- Committee Members:
- Jeremy Staff, Thesis Advisor/Co-Advisor
- Keywords:
- Youth employment
Delinquency - Abstract:
- Studies of the potential risks and benefits of youth employment in the past have focused on the average hours of work involvement, largely ignoring whether job quality matters. However, research focusing on youth work shows substantial variability in the quality of these early work experiences, such as rate of pay, length of employment, job satisfaction, supervisor age, and learning opportunities. Yet much of the research on youth employment typically uses hours worked as the main predictive variable, finding that youth who work moderate hours (i.e., average 20 or less hours per week) are less likely to be delinquent than those who work intensive hours (i.e., average more than 20 hours a week) or who do not work at all. Little research has examined how the quality of youth employment influences delinquency, and scholars have not yet modeled these relationships using analyses of within-person change to more fully address issues of spuriousness and selection. The purpose of this study is to extend research on youth employment by examining the effects of the quality of work on juvenile delinquency. I extend prior research in four ways: First, using longitudinal data from the 1997 cohort of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY97), I estimate both random and fixed effects models to assess whether changes in employment status and work intensity impact changes in delinquency during adolescence. Secondly, borrowing from criminological theory and past research, I assess whether changes in job duration, supervisor age, job satisfaction and rate of pay predict changes in delinquency among those youth who are employed. Little research has examined the quality of youth work and that which does exist has not utilized random and fixed effects modeling to test work quality effects. Further, many of these studies of quality are based on small or non-representative samples whereas the NLSY97 is large and nationally representative, allowing for testing of subgroup differences. Third, building on prior research, I consider whether the effect of work quality on delinquency is moderated by family socioeconomic background. In particular, I estimate the relationship between work experience measures and delinquency in separate models for low parental education youth and high parental education youth, and then compare the equality of these estimates. Finally, again building upon prior research, I consider whether school performance mediates the effect of work quality on delinquency. Results show that higher hourly pay, higher job satisfaction and older supervisors significantly reduce levels of delinquency. However, once controls for unobserved time-stable characteristics are controlled for in the fixed effects models, these relationships largely disappear, with supervisor age retaining marginal significance. The effect of supervisor age is partially moderated by parental education level, indicating that youth with parents with low levels of education are less delinquent when working for older supervisors. GPA was not found to mediate the relationships between the work experience measures and delinquency. Overall, the results suggest that work is unlikely to act as a turning point for most youth already engaged in delinquency. However, for disadvantaged youth, working in jobs with older supervisors may provide additional informal social control which works to reduce levels of delinquency.