NCJ Number
216644
Journal
Journal of Youth and Adolescence Volume: 35 Issue: 6 Dated: December 2006 Pages: 867-880
Date Published
December 2006
Length
14 pages
Annotation
This study used nationally representative data to examine the links among community characteristics, family structure, and adolescent problem behaviors.
Abstract
The study found that adolescents from homes with a recently divorced mother, a mother and stepfather, a single mother, or a single father reported more problem behaviors regardless of the community characteristics. A second finding was that adolescents who lived in communities with a high percentage of impoverished residents, female-headed households, or jobless males reported more problem behaviors regardless of family structure. Study data were drawn from the National Education Longitudinal Study (NELS), which examined the impact of families and schools on a variety of educational and behavioral outcomes. The initial wave of NELS involved a representative sample of 24,599 eighth-grade students from U.S. schools in 1988. A subsample of this original group was interviewed in 1990, when most of the students were in 10th grade. The 10th-grade sample was representative of 10th-grade students in the U.S. in 1990 (n=20,706). The outcome variable, problem behaviors, was based on six questions about past-year experiences with in-school and out-of-school fighting, getting suspended or expelled from school, and being arrested. The key explanatory variable used in the analysis was family structure, which was assessed through a set of questions about the person with whom the respondent lived at the time of the 10th-grade interview. Data for the community-level variables were draw from the 1990 Decennial Census aggregated to the zipcode level. 3 tables and 65 references