Human agency has been a focus of philosophical and sociological concern from early debates about "free will" to recent themes in poststructuralism. Debates over the proper understanding of structure, agency, and constraint are hindered by the fact that few if any empirical measures of these concepts have been proposed. As sociologists have long recognized, the total results of the decisions of a group's members can be viewed as a distribution, and parameters can be fit to obtain a description of observed distributions. In popular and advocacy-based accounts, considerable focus has been placed on the relative powerlessness of female VDMST. Using the proposed modeling technique, the current project tested the extent to which male versus female VDMST appear to possess greater agency (or function under more limiting constraints) when deciding whether to remain in sex work or "leave the life". Contrary to existing literature, the current results indicate that male and female underage sex workers are experiencing similar levels of agency and differ mainly in opportunity and constraint. Other individual circumstances are shown to contribute to varying levels of agency and constraint among sex workers, including street work status, community trouble, drug use, and the availability of an alternative income.
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