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Methods: This study uses data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997, which contains information on net worth and assets of adult children and parents.

Results: Results from the simple unconditional means (UCM) model suggest that adult children's net worth increases as they age.

Conclusions and Implications: This study finds that parents' new worth is a strong indicator of children's future new worth, although racial heterogeneity in the wealth transmission exists.

Transitions to work for racial, ethnic, and immigrant groups --Participation in career and technical education and school-to-work in American high schools -- Do school-to-work programs help the "forgotten half"? -- Learning by doing career academies -- The National Academy Foundation's career academies : shaping postsecondary transitions -- Labor-market linkages among two-year college faculty and their impact on student perceptions, effort, and college persistence – Smoothing the transition from school to work : building job skills for a local labor market.

Table of Contents
Chapter 1 Improving School-to-Work Transitions: Introduction (Neumark)
Chapter 2 Transitions to Work for Racial, Ethnic, and Immigrant Groups (Reed, et al.)
Chapter 3 Participation in Career and Technical Education and School-to-Work in American High Schools (Stone and Aliaga)
Chapter 4 Do School-to-Work Programs Help the "Forgotten Half"? (Neumark and Rothstein)
Chapter 5 Learning by Doing Career Academies (Stern, et al.)
Chapter 6 The National Academy Foundation's Career Academies: Shaping Postsecondary Transitions (Orr, et al.)
Chapter 7 Labor-Market Linkages Among Two-Year College Faculty and Their Impact on Student Perceptions, Effort, and College Persistence (Person and Rosenbaum)
Chapter 8 Smoothing the Transition from School to Work: Building Job Skills for a Local Labor Market (Maxwell)

Background: Short interpregnancy timing during adolescence, or an early repeat pregnancy, is a concerning outcome for adolescent mothers because they exacerbate the previous and ongoing adversities of adolescent mothers. Although social support tends to be positive for parenting and well-being, it is unclear whether social support is protective for when adolescent mothers experience a repeat pregnancy. Parents are the primary source of support for adolescent mothers; thus, it is important to examine their influence on adolescent mothers' experience(s) of repeat pregnancy.

Methods: Semi-Markov multistate models were applied to 20 years of data to examine the relationship between support and timing and risk of subsequent pregnancies for 471 adolescent mothers in the National Longitudinal Study of Youth 1997.

Results: This study found that emotional and financial support from parents predicts a higher likelihood of delayed repeat pregnancies, whereas informational support from parents predicts earlier repeat pregnancies for adolescent mothers.

Taking a CTE+ curriculum is a positive and significant predictor of college attainment. I found these students and academic/general students more likely to matriculate to college and earn a college degree than those who majored in a vocational concentration alone.

The results of this study suggest that states and local districts implemented the Tech Prep reforms of the 1998 Perkins legislation and that CTE+ students experienced higher college matriculation and degree completion rates than students in the academic/general track. This study additionally found that while more than 60 percent of vocational concentrators matriculated to college, fewer than 15 percent completed an associate or bachelors degree during the study period. The study found stratification among high school programs by family income, parent education level, gender and high school grades. CTE+ students came from the most highly educated and wealthy parents of the three programs, while vocational students came from families with the lowest education levels and least wealth. CTE+ students reported the highest grades, while vocational students reported the lowest grades of the three high school programs. Males were more highly concentrated in the vocational track than in other high school programs.

Implications of the study include new research models for determining postsecondary education success to include new variables such as credit-based agreements, college entrance test scores, types of vocational programs, and ratio of academic to vocational course-taking. Implications for practice suggest that the Perkins reforms of the 1990s have resulted in better college outcomes for students taking an enhanced vocational program; therefore practitioners must require all vocational students to take rigorous academic courses in addition to vocational courses. Finally, future research should be conducted to determine why so many vocational students never complete a college degree.

The present study tested both theories with data from the ensuring NLSY97 survey, which represents the 15 + million 12–17 year old adolescents living in the US in 1997.

Total sample analyses confirmed the existence of significant inverse white-black IQ sex differences, and disconfirmed the null sex difference theory.

Separate race-age analyses demonstrated, however, that robust IQ sex differences materialize only after age 16, with no white-black interaction. At age 17, female IQ trails male by 3.6-7.03 points in three races, respectively.

Classical IQ probability curves foretell that more males than females will enter the highest echelons of society, irrespective of race, and white Male/Female ratios at IQ 145 successfully predicted real-life sex differences in educational and occupational achievement. White males with IQ 55 can be expected to run a very high risk of encountering severe achievement problems, a risk shared to some extent with Hispanic male, but black females with this low IQ can be expected to perform worse than black males.

Methods: Using data from the National Health Interview Survey, the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, and the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, we have used analytic approaches ranging from descriptive statistics to advanced modeling techniques, including Structural Equation Modeling (www.umiamiorg.com). Young workers were examined by age, occupational and industry sector groupings and a range of health and psychosocial outcomes.

Results: A series of manuscripts and a monograph on young workers have been produced based on these publicly-available data. We highlight relevant findings and the challenges of utilizing these data. Opportunities for linkages with the National Death Index and O*Net to create enriched datasets to look at mortality and occupational exposures are explored.

Conclusions: There are many available datasets that can be used to study young worker health. However, each source comes with important limitations. In particular, most data sources are based on general purpose surveys that lack detailed information on work environment and occupation-specific exposures. Possible designs for a targeted nationally-representative study of young workers are proposed.

Methods. Data came from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997, a longitudinal cohort study of youths born between 1980 and 1984 in the United States. Based on respondents' reports of substance misuse (past-month binge drinking and past-year marijuana and other illicit drug use) from 2000 to 2016, we estimated substance misuse trajectories of job skills training (n = 317) and basic services (n = 264) groups. We accounted for potential selection bias by using inverse probability of treatment weighting.

Results. Compared with the basic services group, the job skills training group showed notable long-term reductions in its illicit drug misuse trajectory, translating to a 56.9% decrease in prevalence rates from 6.5% in year 0 to 2.8% in year 16.

Five specific experiences were examined, namely: program of study, high school graduation, dropout, transition to postsecondary, and transition to employment. The main research question that guided the study was: Among at-risk youth, do the academic and transitional experiences vary by race, race and gender, and race and residence?

Data for the study were drawn from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY97). A sub-sample of 837 participants was used. At-risk youth were defined as those from families living below poverty level in the United States and who are at risk of experiencing academic and transitional difficulties as a result of their poor economic backgrounds. Descriptive and multivariate statistics were used to analyze the data. Frequency counts, percentages and Chi-square tests were used in the descriptive analysis and logistic regression and survival analysis were used in the multivariate analyses. Findings revealed that among at-risk youth there are no variations in high school graduation, dropout, and transition to postsecondary education. In general, at-risk white males are as likely as all other at-risk youth to experience the negative effects of poverty when faced with equal levels of economic hardships. Their patterns of enrollment in programs vary slightly, but overall all at-risk youth are more likely to follow a general curriculum. The one major exception is that blacks in rural America are significantly less likely to be employed than their white counterparts even when poverty levels are controlled.

One of the most significant decisions a person makes is the decision to marry, and while this decision may not affect the labor market immediately, in the long run it is a decision with such powerful effects that its impact on shaping the labor market is substantial even if not immediate. Marriage has important effects on fertility. At one time decisions on fertility and decisions on marriage were inextricably entwined. Over the past half-century, this connection has loosened considerably. … the focus of this paper is not on the change in the marriage rate. Instead, the question we seek to answer is whether the process of matching potential spouses with one another has fundamentally changed or not.

The findings indicate that family stability and living with two biological parents is a stronger predictor of high school graduation than parent marital quality and the quality of the parent--child relationship. But the data also indicate that parent marital quality and the quality of the parent--child relationship have a strong and positive effect on postsecondary education access among those who do graduate from high school. These findings are interpreted in light of the contribution of relationship quality to further educational involvement and the implications this has for workforce development and successful labor force competition in a global economy.

Copyright of Marriage & Family Review is the property of Haworth Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abst ract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

I provide a descriptive overview of the employment and earning behavior of the NLSY97 youths and test for the effects of both family and individual characteristics and federal and state laws upon their behavior. Nearly half of all youths (47 percent) earned income in 1996. Results indicate that minimum wages reduce the probability of labor force participation for female youths aged 14-16, while subminimum wage certificate programs (allowing students to work at wages below the minimum wage) help mitigate the disemployment effects of minimum wages.

I describe and assess the quality of the parental transfer data from the NLSY97 and test for the determinants of parental allowances. The median annual allowance received by youths aged 12-16 in 1996 was $260, the equivalent of $5 per week. Surprisingly, black youths are more likely to receive allowances, and to receive higher allowances, than non-black, non-Hispanic youths. Reduced-form estimations also indicate that allowances depend upon parents' wherewithal, given the effects of parents' income and the number of siblings upon allowances.

Finally, I present an altruism model of youths' earnings and parental transfers where the parent does not directly control the child's earnings. Using a tobit two-stage procedure, I find that youths earn less the greater their allowances, and that parents decrease allowance amounts in response to youths' decisions to earn more. It is also important to allow earnings and allowances to be jointly determined in order to assess the effects of family and individual characteristics upon earnings and allowances. For example, allowances conditional upon earnings do not depend directly upon being black. Therefore, black parents apparently compensate their children for having a lower probability of labor force participation.

The first chapter proposes and tests a new theory for the effectiveness of religious schools, specifically, the school as an extension of the culture of the home. I introduce the notion of "fit" between students and schools, and ask whether students and schools may make better or worse matches which have observable effects on student outcomes. Using NLSY97 data, I find that students matched to schools of their own religious preference enjoy an advantage of about 5-8 percentile points in math and reading. This is equivalent to about one third of a standard deviation in test scores, or half the size of the black-white test-score gap.

The second chapter explores the micro-level effects of changes in contraceptive technology. We develop a two-stage model with endogenous household decisions regarding sex, fertility, marriage, and the consumption of other goods. We examine changes in behavior in response to marginal changes in contraceptive efficacy. We find that an increase in contraceptive efficacy, such as the Pill, leads to increased sexual activity but has ambiguous effects on the children per household, where married households will have fewer children and unmarried households will have more. These results correspond to recent historical trends which characterize the so-called "second demographic transition", such as declining total fertility rates and rising non-marital fertility.

The third chapter proposes a theory of parental investment in education based on strategic interactions with other parents. When parents are viewed as suppliers of an important complementary good, the school setting provides a difficulty for parents and policy makers characterized by problems of both a public goods nature and a moral hazard nature. I show that when households differ in cost of supply or private valuation of the educational good, underinvestment may arise in school settings, especially when schools are unable to sort students according to characteristics correlated with parental efforts. These results may provide a mechanism for observed peer effects and help to explain declining educational outcomes in some settings.

In this report we describe the first study that has assessed the value of a religious "good fit" in education. Using US data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 (NLSY97), the study estimated a religious match effect, which is the difference in standardized test scores for students paired to schools of their same religion, after controlling for other variables.

The study, published today (Dec. 14) in the Journal of Adolescent Health, found that girls who started school early for their age had lower body mass indexes (BMI), a measure of fatness, as teens. The reason why starting school younger affects weight later isn't known, said study researcher Ning Zhang of the University of Rochester School of Medicine.

"Within any grade, younger girls may be exposed to relatively older friends, who are more careful about their weight and physical appearance," Zhang said in a statement.

Zhang and her colleagues analyzed data on almost 6,000 teenage girls from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, which is an annual survey of a nationally representative group of adolescents born in the early 1980s. Using data collected between 1997 and 2004, the researchers took advantage of school enrollment cut-offs. Children whose birthdays fall just after the cut-off date are required to delay starting school until the next year, making them old for their grade. Children whose birthdays are just before the cut-off date are young for their grade.

Cut-off dates create two groups of kids at the same developmental stage with one year's difference in their schooling, the researchers wrote. Comparing the two groups, the researchers found that among girls whose birthdays were within a month of the cut-off date, those who started early for their age (that is, almost a full year earlier than their oldest classmates) were more likely to be normal weight. Those who started late for their age were more likely to be overweight or obese.

The results held after the researchers controlled for age, race, level of maternal education and mother's body weight. In boys, there was no relationship between school start time and weight, according to the researchers.

Schooling might help lower weight because of physical education classes, Zhang said. Girls who start school earlier are exposed to more sophisticated health classes sooner and may participate in more advanced physical exercise, she said.

The findings may also represent the cumulative effect of early childhood, said Matt Longjohn, a physician and fellow with the non-profit Altarum Institute. Longjohn, who was not involved in the study, said in a statement that "changes in just a few small behaviors can have large and lasting effects on small bodies."

Previous research has found big impacts from early education. For example, kindergarten grades are tied to adult income, while elementary school bad behavior can compromise education and lead to career problems.

Design/methodology/approach: The data is from the 2010 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 (NLSY97). The NLSY97 includes information on US young consumers' financial, demographic and attitudinal characteristics, as well as various socio-economic conditions, making it convenient to explore the relationships between financial behavior and psychology variables. In the 2010 survey, 4,110 young consumers were interviewed.

Findings: The results show that self-determination and motivation alone cannot bring about a direct change in financial behavior without the mediation of financial psychology. Therefore, consumer finance research should consider debt-management behavior by presenting different strategies than those currently used.

In the third essay, I explored the effect of underemployment--a phenomenon in which 4-year college graduates gain employment in a place that does not require that degree--on marriage and childbirth using the NLSY97. To help explain the link between underemployment and marriage and childbirth, I additionally investigated the factors related to initial underemployment and the effect of underemployment on future labor market outcomes. First, I found that being underemployed at the start of a career highly related to grades and major. Second, I found no evidence that underemployment prevented marriage and childbirth in the short term, both in cross-sectional and panel analyses. Third, through a hazard model analysis, I confirmed that underemployment persistently affected future labor market outcomes for both men and women and that the effect was stronger for men. I also found that, at least for women, underemployment at the beginning of a career negatively related to having a first child. Fourth, with a different measurement method to judge underemployment, I found that underemployed men at a starting point in their career were more likely to remain persistently underemployed but that being underemployed at the start did not relate to marriage or childbirth for men and women.

The purpose of the present study was to examine whether adolescent perceptions of mothers' and fathers' contributions to interparental discord changed from early to middle adolescence and if the changes were related to adolescent negative mood. Data were drawn from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997. Adolescents who were in 7th grade at the Wave 1 assessment and lived with both biological parents during Waves 1-4 were included in this research ( n=812; 55% boys; 69% White). Findings indicated that adolescents' perceptions of their mothers' and their fathers' contributions to interparental discord increased at similar rates from early to middle adolescence. The largest increases in adolescent perceptions of mothers' and fathers' contributions to interparental discord from 7th to 9th grades were associated with the largest increases in adolescent negative mood from 7th to 10th grades. Girls' perceptions of their fathers' contributions to interparental relationship problems increased at a steeper rate compared with boys. Findings are discussed in the context of the sensitization hypothesis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Journal of Research on Adolescence (Blackwell Publishing Limited) is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Method: A systematic review was conducted following Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) guidelines, followed by a subsequent meta-analysis investigating the associations between state-level cannabis laws (ie, MCL vs non-MCL, and RCL vs non-RCL) and past-month cannabis use prevalence among US adolescents and young adults. Supplemental analyses examined age-group effects and design-related factors.

Results: Our search identified 4,604 citations, 34 and 30 of which were included in qualitative and quantitative analyses, respectively. Meta-analysis of MCL studies identified no significant association between MCL and change in past-month youth cannabis use (odds ratio [OR] = 0.981, 95% CI = 0.960, 1.003). Meta-analysis of RCL studies showed significantly increased odds of past-month cannabis use (OR = 1.134, 95% CI = 1.116-1.153). Meta-analysis of more recent studies, however, showed a significantly increased odds of past-month cannabis use among both adolescents and young adults (OR = 1.089, 95% CI = 1.015,1.169, and OR = 1.221, 95% CI = 1.188,1.255, respectively).

Conclusion: Cannabis legalization has complex and heterogenous effects on youth use that may differ across law types. Our meta-analytic results showed modest positive effects of RCL on past-month cannabis use (more so in young adults than in adolescents) and minimal effects of MCL on these outcomes in US youth. Given the shift toward recreational legalization, additional focus on RCL effects is warranted.

Methods: Using panel data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth-1997, we examined the presence of pain interference at age 29 and chronic pain at ages 35 to 39. Persistent pain was defined as pain present at both interview time points; new-onset pain was defined as pain not reported at age 29, but present at ages 35 to 39; and transient pain was defined as experiencing pain interference at age 29 with no report of chronic pain at ages 35 to 39.

Results: Based on a sample of 6188 participants, we estimated that 4% experienced persistent pain, 11% experienced transient pain, and 7% experienced new-onset pain. Pain persistence was less likely among non-Hispanic Black respondents but more likely among formerly married respondents and those with poor health, health-related work limitation, or greater pain interference at the age 29 baseline. New-onset pain was most likely among female respondents, respondents with some college education, and respondents with poor self-rated health or obesity at baseline.

Discussion: Development of chronic pain by the mid-late 30s was common among young adults experiencing pain interference at age 29. Race/ethnicity, gender, and educational attainment exhibited different associations with persistence as compared with new onset of pain problems.

AAPOR SESSION E: Impact of Telephone Sampling Design on Sample Efficiency and Bias -- Friday 5/19/2000 1. Introduction. The National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY97) is the latest in a series of surveys sponsored by the U.S. Department of Labor (DoL) to examine issues surrounding youth entry into the work force and subsequent transitions in and out of the work force. The NLSY97 is following a cohort of approximately 9,000 youths who completed an interview in 1997 (the base year). These youths were between 12 and 16 years of age as of December 31, 1996, and are being interviewed annually using a mix of some core questions asked annually and varying subject modules. We will compare two different weighting strategies for the first three rounds of NLSY97 data.

In order to improve the precision of estimates for minority youths, the overall study design for NLSY97 included a large oversample of Hispanic youths and non-Hispanic black youths. The overall design resulted in one large screening sample of over 90,000 housing units to generate youth participants for NLSY97. These housing units were drawn from two independent area-probability samples: 1. a crosssectional (CX) sample designed to represent the various segments of the eligible population in their proper population proportions, and 2. a supplemental (SU) sample designed to produce, in the most statistically efficient way, the required oversamples of Hispanic youths and non-Hispanic black youths. This paper’s main concern is with the construction of sampling weights for estimating population characteristics using both samples together. The paper gives more detailed descriptions of the

Excerpt
Running away from home puts youth at risk of violence, crime, drugs, prostitution, HIV and other STDs, and other health problems. Youth who have run away from their home demonstrate high rates of delinquent and problem behaviors, including substance abuse (Johnson, Whitbeck, and Hoyt 2005), truancy (De Man 2000), gang involvement (Yoder, Whitbeck, and Hoyt 2003), criminal activity (Hammer, Finkelhor, and Sedlack 2002), and juvenile arrest (Kaufman and Widom 1999). Runaway youth are not only likely to perpetrate crimes and engage in delinquent behaviors, they are also likely to have been victimized at home (Tyler, Cauce, and Whitbeck 2004; Thompson, Zittel-Palamara, and Maccio 2004; Kurtz and Kurtz 1991) and to experience additional victimization once they leave home.

Estimates of the runaway population are difficult to obtain and the exact number of runaway youth is not really known (Greene, et al. 2003). Several studies have attempted to estimate the number or percentage of youth who have run away from home in the previous year, with estimates ranging widely from 1.6 million to 2.8 million.

Another important measure of runaway behavior is lifetime prevalence, that is, the percentage of youth who ever run away from home. Identifying lifetime prevalence is important for understanding the causes and consequences of running away, yet little is known about lifetime runaway prevalence. The most often cited study by Nye and Edelbrock (1980) estimated that one in eight youth runs away before the age of 18, but that study infers est imates from a cross-sectional survey intended to generate a one-year incidence measure using data collected in 1976.

One confounding problem in understanding the size of the runaway population is that runaway experiences among youth tend to be episodic rather than chronic (Robertson 1991). Since most studies focus on a one-year reference period, little is known about to what extent youth have multiple runaway episodes. Multiple episodes may distort the estimates of lifetime prevalence that are based on a single cross-section survey. Furthermore, studies focused on one year do not capture the age at which youth first ran away, an important factor in understanding the phenomenon.

In this paper, we exploit a useful data set, the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, 1997 cohort (NLSY97), to develop three measures not generally found in the literature. First, we estimate the percentage of youth who run away from home before the age of 18, that is, "lifetime" prevalence. Second, we estimate the distribution of the number of times youth run away before age 18, and finally, we estimate the age at which these youth first run away.

In the next section, we review the various estimates of runaway incidence. After describing the NLSY97 data set, we present estimates of the percentage of youth who have ever run away, the number of times they've run away, and the age at which they first ran away. We then conclude with a discussion of how these estimates help inform about runaway behavior.

In light of teen mothers' heightened risk of becoming high school dropouts, Child Trends used recently released national survey data to explore high school diploma and GED attainment among women who had given birth as teens. Particularly, we looked at whether they had earned these educational credentials by the time that they reached their early twenties.

Our findings show that slightly more than one-half of young women who had been teen mothers received a high school diploma by the age of 22, compared with 89 percent of young women who had not given birth during their teen years. Furthermore, results of our analyses show that young women who had a child before the age of 18 were even less likely than were those who had a child when they were 18 or 19 to earn a high school diploma before the age of 22, although the rates of GED attainment in the former group were slightly higher. We also found differences in educational attainment among teen mothers by race/ethnicity.

The second chapter analyzes the influence that juvenile offenders serving time in the same correctional facility have on each other's subsequent criminal behavior. The analysis is based on data on over 8,000 individuals serving time in 169 juvenile correctional facilities during a two-year period in Florida. To control for the non-random assignment to facilities, we include facility fixed effects, thereby estimating peer effects using only within-facility variation over time. We find strong evidence of peer effects for various categories of theft, burglary, and felony drug and weapon crimes; the influence of peers primarily affects individuals who already have some experience in a particular crime category.

Lastly, the third chapter analyzes the impact of juvenile arrest, charge, conviction, and incarceration on an individual's propensity to graduate high school. Using the 1997 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, I control for a large set of observable characteristics that are likely to be correlated with an individual's interactions with the justice system and his education outcomes. I also use the sample of individuals from multiple respondent hou seholds to control for unobservable household level characteristics. The findings suggest that arrest and incarceration when age 16 or younger have a significant negative effect on an individual's propensity to graduate high school; however, charge and conviction do not play a significant role in an individual's education outcomes over and above the effect of arrest.

Methods: We select two nationally representative birth cohorts in the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY) 1979 and 1997 (N = 9821). We use the difference-in-difference approach to examine whether the positions of teen parents have progressed or worsened across the two cohorts.

Conclusion: The birth rates to teenage girls remained unchanged across the two cohorts, but the reported rates of teenage fatherhood increased. The proportions of both unmarried teenage fathers and mothers increased between the two cohorts. Teen fathers and mothers came increasingly from single-mother families with disadvantaged backgrounds. The proportion of teen mothers or fathers living with partners has not changed, but there has been a major shift from marriage to non-marital cohabitation. The education and earnings of the 1997 cohort of teen parents showed some progress relative to the earlier teen parent cohort, but no progress relative to peers who were not teen parents.

Methods: Individual fixed effect regression models utilizing National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (1997) data test whether age moderates the mental health impact of arrest, conviction, or incarceration. Follow-up analyses for moderated associations compute and compare age-specific relationships to identify differences in the significance and magnitude of mental health consequences for contacts spanning late adolescence, emerging adulthood, and adulthood.

Results: The incarceration-mental health relationship is moderated by age, as significant harms to mental health are exclusively observed following secure confinement in late adolescence (ages 16-17) and emerging adulthood (18-24), but not in adulthood (25-33). The lack of moderation between arrest and mental health indicates a universally harmful experience at all ages.

Researchers analyzed data from nearly 6,000 girls in the U.S. National Longitudinal Survey of Youth.

Girls who were eligible to start school at a younger age than most of their classmates were significantly less likely to be overweight during adolescence. Girls who started school at an older age than most of their classmates were more likely to be overweight in adolescence, the investigators found.

A similar effect was not found in boys, said lead author Ning Zhang, of the University of Rochester School of Medicine, and colleagues.

The study was published online Dec. 14 in the Journal of Adolescent Health.

Peer influence may be one reason why girls who start school at a younger age are less likely to be overweight, the authors suggest.

"Within any grade, younger girls may be exposed to relatively older friends, who are more careful about their weight and physical appearance," Zhang said in a journal news release.

In addition, girls who are young for their grade have earlier exposure to more detailed and sophisticated health and diet information at school and have the opportunity to participate in more advanced physical activity instruction as well.

More information
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention outlines how parents can help their children maintain a healthy weight.

A sub-sample of 4,688 adolescents from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 was used to address the association between family processes, demographic variables, and adolescent Body Mass Index (BMI) percentile over four years. Due to the inclusion of siblings in the sample, the data are non-independent. Longitudinal multilevel xv modeling was used to adjust for this non-independence. The final model indicated that frequency of family meals, sex, race, father's parenting style, control, and mother's BMI were important predictors of adolescent BMI percentile over time. Mother's BMI was the strongest predictor of adolescent BMI percentile. More frequent family meals led to decreases in BMI percentile over time, while males, African Americans, and Latinos had higher average BMI percentiles than other groups.

These findings suggest the need for intervention that focuses on mother's health and healthy behaviors in the home. At risk groups, including African American and Latino adolescents and males, should be targeted for these interventions. Additionally, the results indicated that using multilevel modeling with the NLSY97 was important due to nesting within families.

Copyright of Marriage & Family Review is the property of Haworth Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Results: Our estimates suggest past-30-day substance use decreases the probability of current participation. Unobserved characteristics that increase the probability of participation also increase the probability of substance use. Our results are consistent across a range of sensitivity analyses.

Methods: Based on nine annual waves of national panel data from the NLSY97, this study uses growth curve and group-based trajectory modeling to examine the dynamic and cumulative prevalence of gang membership, variability in the pathways into and out of gangs, and the correlates of these pathways from ages 10 to 23.

Results: The cumulative prevalence of gang membership was 8%, while the dynamic age-graded prevalence of gang membership peaked at 3% at age 15. Six distinct trajectories accounted for variability in the patterning of gang membership, including an adult onset trajectory. Gang membership in adulthood was an even mix of adolescence carryover and adult initiation. The typical gang career lasts 2 years or less, although much longer for an appreciable subset of respondents. Gender and racial/ethnic disproportionalities in gang membership increase in magnitude over the life-course.

Conclusions: Gang membership is strongly age-graded. The results of this study support a developmental research agenda to unpack the theoretical and empirical causes and consequences of gang membership across stages of the life-course.

Method: Data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 and propensity score matching were used to assess the cumulative and longitudinal effects of gang membership on seven educational outcomes, including educational attainment in years and six educational milestones. After adjusting for nonrandom selection into gangs, youths who joined a gang were compared annually to their matched counterparts from 1998 to 2009.

Results: Selection-adjusted estimates revealed disparities between gang and nongang youth in education attainment. Youth who joined gangs were 30 percent less likely to graduate from high school and 58 percent less likely to earn a four-year degree than their matched counterparts. The effects of gang membership on educational attainment were statistically observable within one year of joining, and accumulated in magnitude over time to reach -0.62 years (ES=0.25) by the final point of observation.

Conclusion: The snare-like forces linked to the onset of gang membership have consequences that spill into a range of life domains, including education. These findings take on added significance because of a historical context where education has a prominent role in social stratification.

The key findings in this dissertation include: (1) selection adjustments partially or fully confounded the effects of gang joining; despite this (2) gang joiners had 70 percent the odds of earning a high school diploma and 42 percent the odds of earning a 4-year college degree than matched individuals who avoided gangs; (3) at the 11-year mark, the effect of gang joining on educational attainment exceeded one-half year; (4) gang joiners made up for proximate deficits in high school graduation and college matriculation, but gaps in 4-year college degree and overall educational attainment gained throughout the study; (5) gang joiners were less likely to be employed and more likely to not participate in the labor force, and these differences accelerated toward the end of the study; (6) gang joiners spent an additional one-third of a year jobless relative to their matched counterparts; and (7) the cumulative effect of gang joining on annual income exceeded $14,000, which was explained by the patterning of joblessness rather than the quality of jobs. The theoretical and policy implications of these findings, as well as directions for future research, are addressed in the concluding chapter of this dissertation.

Methods: Data were from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997, which is representative of youth born between 1980 and 1984. Age-specific patterns of gang joining, participation, and leaving are estimated based on youths (N=7,335) self-reported gang membership at the baseline and eight subsequent interviews, which were combined with population age estimates from the 2010 U.S. Census to produce national estimates of gang membership. Sampling variance-adjusted bounds were estimated based on assumptions about missing cases and survey design effects. Demographic and socioeconomic variables are used to compare differences between gang and nongang youth.

Results: Youth gang members were disproportionately male, black, Hispanic, from single-parent households, and families living below the poverty level. We estimated that there were 1,059,000 youth gang members in the United States in 2010 (bounds ranging from 675,000 to 1,535,000). The prevalence of youth gang membership was 2.0% (1.2%-2.8%), peaking at age 14 years at 5.0% (3.9%-6.0%). Annually, 401,000 (204,000-639,000) juveniles join gangs and 378,000 (199,000-599,000) exit gangs, with a turnover rate of 36%.

Conclusions: We discovered that significantly more people are involved with gangs than previous estimates would suggest. Clinicians and policy makers must recognize that youth gang members may not conform to popular perceptions of gang demographics. The patterns of youth gang membership observed in this study support prevention programs aimed at children before the teen years. This strategy is more likely to succeed than gang intervention or suppression strategies aimed at teens.

The researchers used several statistical models to link obesity rates to the amount of time spent viewing fast food advertising, finding that viewing more fast food commercials on television raises the risk of obesity in children. The study appears in this month's issue of The Journal of Law and Economics.

"There is not a lot of evidence that overweight kids are more likely to watch TV than other kids," said Michael Grossman, professor of economics at the City University of New York. "We're arguing the causality is how many messages are aired -- seeing more of these messages is leading people to put on weight." The study's co-authors are Shin-Yi Chou, an economist at Lehigh College, and Inas Rashad, an economist at Georgia State University.

But the researchers' estimate relies on older data gathered in the late 1990s, according to Elaine Kolish, a spokesman for the Council of Better Business Bureaus. Since then, two of the largest fast food chains -- Burger King and McDonald's -- and more than a dozen other packaged food companies have signed on to the council's Children's Food and Beverage Advertising Initiative, she said, pledging to advertise only their healthier products to children under age 12.

As a result, both Burger King and McDonald's now air ads for children's meals including apple sticks and low-fat milk. "I can't help think that two huge chains advertising apples and milk to kids is going to be affecting children's preferences," Ms. Kolish said.

Kelly Brownell, director of Yale University's Rudd Center for Food Policy, said reliable estimates of television's impact on childhood obesity are hard to calculate because of the many assumptions statisticians must make. "That said, food marketing is a blight on the landscape of our children and has been shown time and again to have a negative impact," he added.

Only three countries -- Sweden, Norway and Finland -- have banned commercial sponsorship of children's programs, and study authors acknowledged that the chances of such a ban in the U.S. are slim.

But since ads are a tax-deductible business expense, the researchers also analyzed the potential impact of eliminating federal tax deductions for fast food ads aimed at children. Such a move would curb childhood obesity by 5 to 7 percent, the analysis found.

Methods: This longitudinal prospective follow-up used 718,560 person-years of observation in a pooled data set of 5 high-quality nationally representative panels--National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 and 1997, National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, and Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Kindergarten cohorts of 1998 and 2011--constructed by the authors, covering 1980-2016. Differences in obesity incidence across birth cohorts and disparities in obesity incidence by sex and race/ethnicity (non-Hispanic Black, Hispanic, and non-Hispanic White) were tested in multivariate models. Data were analyzed from September 2018 to October 2021.

Results: Obesity incidence increased by approximately 6% for each 1 year of age (hazard ratio=1.06, 95% CI=1.05, 1.07); however, incidence was nonlinear, exhibiting an inverted "U"-shaped pattern before 15 years of age and then rising from adolescence through 30 years. Obesity incidence more than doubled between the cohorts born in 1957-1965 and those born in 1974-1985 during adolescence. There was no significant change among those born in 1991-1994 and 2003-2006 up to age 15 years. Compared with non-Hispanic White children, non-Hispanic Black and Hispanic children had higher obesity incidence in all study cohorts. The magnitude of these disparities on the relative scale remained stable throughout the study period.

In the second chapter, "Measuring the STEM Wage Premium Among College Graduates," I estimate the wage benefits associated with training in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM), and assess the sensitivity of the STEM wage premium to changes in the way STEM is measured. Measuring STEM can differ in two ways: the definition of STEM (i.e., determining what fields are STEM) and incorporating STEM training into the empirical analysis with a dichotomous or continuous measure of STEM training. Using a sample of college graduates with college transcript data in the NLSY97, I compare a total of six measures STEM training: for three different definitions of STEM (based on lists published by three different U.S. government agencies), I construct a continuous measure of STEM training (based on the amount of STEM coursework completed in college) and a dichotomous measure (based on if the worker completed a STEM major). Although the results confirm the general finding that there is a STEM wage premium, they demonstrate tha t estimates of that premium are relatively insensitive to the definition of STEM training but highly sensitive to whether a dichotomous or continuous measure is used.

In the third chapter, "Education and Job Matching: A Two Cohort Comparison," I compare the incidence and log-wage penalty of overeducation and undereducation among two generations of college graduates. Mismatch is defined based on degree, where a worker is classified as overeducated (undereducated) is he completes a degree that is greater (less) than what is required by his occupation. Data for the older cohort (born 1957-1964) is from the NLSY79 and the younger cohort (born 1980-1984) from the NLSY97.

Design: We used data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 and estimated logit regressions to examine the effect of changes in unemployment rates during infancy on the incidence of adolescent behavioral problems, controlling for known youth, family, and environmental risk factors.

Reprinted in Denver Post, Las Vegas Sun, and other news outlets.

Design/methodology/approach: Using a longitudinal research design, this study draws from a national representative survey of USA adolescents, the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (1997) (NLSY97). Nonaggressive antisocial behavior was assessed with a composite scale that measured economic self-interest and with a second measure that focused on substance abuse. Aggressive antisocial behavior was assessed as a measure of aggressive, destructive behaviors, such as fighting and property destruction. Entrepreneurial persistence was operationalized as years of self-employment experience, which is based on the number of years a respondent reported any self-employment.

Findings: Aggressive antisocial behavior is positively related to entrepreneurial persistence but nonaggressive antisocial behavior is not. This relationship is moderated by gender and socioeconomic status.

In the first two studies, we explored the policy dimension of an individual's environment, specifically how the state-level policy environment shapes frequency of alcohol use. We used data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 (NLSY97) cohort, a nationally representative, longitudinal sample of emerging adults.

The fourth chapter uses longitudinal survey data to measure the effect of student loan interest rates on college matriculation. Relying on exogenous variation in real student loan interest rates across high school graduation cohorts to identify this effect, I find no statistically significant effect of student loan interest rates on the decision to matriculate immediately to a four-year institution.

(Without exogenous variation, we cannot estimate unbiased causal returns to education. However, the NLSY's rich controls remove much of the omitted variables bias. More importantly, our analysis directly addresses the current form of much policy debate, focused on crude comparisons of means, rather than true causal effects.)

We use the NLSY79 and NLSY97 surveys and focus on earnings.

When compared to a nationally represented sample, criminal justice system employees consistently use illegal substances at lower rates. However, the prevalence of alcohol use among police officers specifically is higher when compared to the general population and increases once employed with the criminal justice system. Information from this research can be used to help agencies with employee selection procedures and employee assistance programs for current employees.

Multilevel mixed effects models are utilized to estimate over time the separate impact of religious behavior and beliefs on deviance, to assess a religious turning point effect across racial/ethnic subgroups, and to evaluate the influence of religiosity on change from deviance characterized as violations of secular and ascetic standards. Analyses of religiosity/spirituality on these differing forms of deviance across race/ethnicity are also conducted.

Findings reveal modest evidence for a religious/spiritual turning point effect in enacting change. Findings highlight the nuanced religion-desistance relationship, as the prosocial impact of a religious turning point differs across race/ethnicity, and depends upon processes relating to attendance to church services or spiritual beliefs, and may be conditional on the type of deviance outcome examined--whether in violation of secular or ascetic deviance.

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