Maternal Employment, Low-Income Youth, and Neighborhoods

描述（由申请人提供）：本研究的目的是了解单亲母亲中的母亲就业对低收入青少年发展的影响。拟议的分析旨在弥合的实证研究结果，从两个领域的研究青少年的发展，侧重于产妇就业和邻里的情况下，特别是经济劣势和社会组织的几个关键特征。更具体地说，我打算解决以下问题：什么是进入和失去母亲的就业和就业的低收入青少年的发展特点的影响？从青春期早期到后期的过渡期与从青春期后期到成年早期的过渡期，这种影响有何不同？控制各种家庭和儿童水平的观察到的和未观察到的特征，邻里环境如何影响这些效果？本研究有四个主要贡献。首先，通过对1998年后四个大城市地区的福利和工作贫困家庭的代表性样本的数据，可以将研究结果推广到比以前的研究更广泛的低收入单亲家庭。第二，数据有多种类型的变化，可以利用经验模型-纵向信息在邻里，家庭以及儿童水平和横截面邻里变化的家庭以及儿童-以控制混淆未观察到的或难以测量的特征，在估计这些关系。第三，低收入青年的大样本提供了对各亚组分别审查影响的能力，特别是按照描述青春期发展过渡的年龄以及种族/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不利程度之外）。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，以及从地方行政机构收集的大量年度指标，包括儿童福利。这项研究是一个实质性的机会，以了解低收入单亲家庭的青少年发展的经济决定因素。调查结果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.