Maternal Employment, Low-Income Youth, and Neighborhoods

描述(申请人提供)：这项研究的目的是了解单身母亲的母亲就业对低收入青少年发展的影响。拟议的分析旨在通过关注母亲就业和邻里环境的几个关键特征，特别是经济劣势和社会组织，将青少年发展研究的两个领域的实证结果联系起来。更具体地说，我打算回答以下问题：进入和失去产妇就业以及就业特点对低收入青少年的发展有什么影响？在从青春期早期到青春期后期的过渡阶段和从青春期后期到成年期早期的过渡阶段，这种影响有何不同？控制各种家庭和儿童层面观察到的和未观察到的特征，邻里环境如何影响这些影响？这项研究的主要贡献有四个。首先，通过1998年后四个大城市地区关于福利和贫困工作家庭的代表性样本的数据，这些发现可以推广到比以前研究更广泛的低收入单亲家庭人口。其次，这些数据有多种类型的差异，可以在经验模型中加以利用--社区、家庭以及儿童层面的纵向信息，以及家庭和儿童之间的横向社区差异--以控制在估计这些关系时混淆未观察到的或难以衡量的特征。第三，低收入青年的大样本提供了单独检查各分组的影响的能力，特别是通过年龄描述青少年发展的转变以及种族/族裔背景和移民状况(此外还有家庭、家庭和兄弟姐妹结构的相对不利程度)。第四，社区数据包括大多数研究人员可以获得的十年一次的人口普查数据，以及从包括儿童福利在内的当地行政机构收集的大量年度指标。这项研究是了解低收入单亲家庭青少年发展的经济决定因素的实质性机会。这些发现将为发展和经济理论以及政策提供参考。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The purpose of this study is to understand the effects of maternal employment among single mothers on the development of low-income adolescents. The proposed analyses aim to bridge the empirical findings from two areas of research on adolescent development by focusing on several key features of maternal employment and neighborhood context, in particular, economic disadvantage and social organization. More specifically, I intend to address the following questions: What is the effect of entry into and loss of maternal employment and characteristics of employment on the development of low-income adolescents? How does this effect differ during transitions from early to later adolescence versus transitions from late adolescence to early adulthood? Controlling for a variety of family and child level observed and unobserved characteristics, how does neighborhood context influence these effects? There are four key contributions of this study. First, by having data from four large urban areas post 1998 on a representative sample of welfare and working-poor families the findings can be generalized to a broader population of low-income single-parent families than has been possible in prior studies. Second, the data have multiple types of variation that can be exploited in empirical models--longitudinal information at a neighborhood, family as well as child level and cross-sectional neighborhood variation by family as well as child--to control for confounding unobserved or difficult to measure characteristics in estimating these relationships. Third, the large sample of low-income youth provide the power to examine effects separately for subgroups, particularly by age depicting transitions in adolescent development as well as racial/ethnic background and immigrant status (in addition to relative levels of disadvantage of the family, family and sibling structure). Fourth, the neighborhood data include the decennial census data available to most researchers as well as a wealth of annual indicators collected from local administrative agencies including child welfare. This study is a substantive opportunity to understand the economic determinants of adolescent development among low-income single-parent families. The findings will inform both developmental and economic theory as well as policy.