Maternal Employment, Low-Income Youth, and Neighborhoods

描述（由申请人提供）：本研究旨在了解单亲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社区背景的几个关键特征，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，我打算讨论以下问题：进入和失去母亲就业以及就业的特点对低收入青少年的发展有什么影响？这种效应在从青春期早期到青春期晚期和从青春期晚期到成年早期的过渡中有什么不同？控制各种家庭和儿童水平观察到的和未观察到的特征，社区环境如何影响这些效应？这项研究有四个关键贡献。首先，通过对1998年后四个大城市福利和工作贫困家庭的代表性样本的数据，研究结果可以推广到更广泛的低收入单亲家庭人口，而不是以前的研究。其次，数据有多种类型的变化，可以在经验模型中利用——在一个社区，家庭和儿童水平的纵向信息和家庭和儿童的横断面邻里变化——来控制在估计这些关系时未观察到的混淆或难以测量的特征。第三，低收入青年的大样本提供了单独检查亚群体影响的能力，特别是根据年龄描述青少年发展的转变，以及种族/民族背景和移民身份（除了家庭、家庭和兄弟姐妹结构的相对劣势水平）。第四，邻里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，以及从地方行政机构收集的丰富的年度指标，包括儿童福利。这项研究为了解低收入单亲家庭中青少年发展的经济决定因素提供了一个实质性的机会。这些发现将为发展和经济理论以及政策提供信息。

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.