Paid Work and Delinquency in Adolescence.

Our study focuses on the relationship between employment and a range of deviant behaviors as youth enter the world of work during the secondary school years. This is a unique period of the life course characterized by labor market problems and a relatively high likelihood of crime and delinquency. Prior research suggests that working long hours in adolescence is associated with high rates of delinquency and substance use, especially for youth from lower socioeconomic origins. Despite these empirical findings, debates still surround the causal efficacy of paid work in adolescence. Does it encourage criminal behavior and substance use, or, alternatively, are engagements in work and crime common constituents of a syndrome of precocious maturity or low self control? Pre-existing individual differences may drive people to select into different work statuses. Intelligence, impulsiveness, ambition, and school failure may affect both the decision to work and the likelihood of crime. Furthermore, youth with higher rates of delinquency and substance use could select themselves into work environments that offer fewer constraints on their subsequent behavior, which would render the effect of work hours on problem behaviors to be spurious. Our study addresses this central problem of research on this topic. To better understand this relationship, we use longitudinal data from the 8th grade samples of the annual Monitoring the Future study, followed in the 10th and 12th grades. We use methods of data analysis that estimate relationships of within-individual changes in crime and deviance to those in work and other explanatory variables, as well as separately considering between-individual differences in observed background characteristics. Doing so minimizes selection bias due to unmeasured individual differences that may be spuriously related to employment and deviant behavior. Our results suggest that much of the positive relationship between teenage work hours and delinquency is spurious. Once accounting for pre-existing characteristics of students that may affect both the onset and hours of teenage work and substance use, long hours on the job have little effect on heavy drinking, illicit drug use, and criminal behavior during the 8th, 10th, and 12th grades. We plan to examine whether these observed relationships vary by gender, race, and socioeconomic background, by the type and quality of these early employment experiences, and by the young person's preference for work. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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