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Title: Do Delinquency and Drug Use Lead to Dropping Out of High School?
Resulting in 1 citation.
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Gasper, Joseph Michael |
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Do Delinquency and Drug Use Lead to Dropping Out of High School? Ph.D. Dissertation, The Johns Hopkins University, 2009 Cohort(s): NLSY97 Publisher: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses (PQDT) Keyword(s): Arrests; Behavioral Problems; Delinquency/Gang Activity; Drug Use; High School Dropouts; Modeling, Random Effects; School Suspension/Expulsion; Socioeconomic Factors Permission to reprint the abstract has not been received from the publisher. Numerous studies have found that high school dropouts are more involved in delinquency and drug use than high school graduates. The fact that delinquency and drug use appear to go hand-in-hand with high school dropout has led some researchers to claim that delinquency and drug use lead to dropping out of school. However, this claim is not fully supported by prior studies that have examined this issue. Although some studies suggest that delinquency and drug use do lead to dropout, other studies find that delinquency and drug use are unrelated to dropout once other predictors of dropout are taken into consideration. This study addresses three shortcomings of prior studies that may account for these divergent findings. This study (1) takes seriously the possibility that, rather than causing dropout, delinquency and drug use are symptoms of underlying problems which also contribute to dropout; (2) examines whether social sanctions--specifically, school suspension and arrest--condition the effects of delinquency and drug use on dropout; (3) explores whether the effects of delinquency and drug use on dropout vary by social class. I use seven waves of data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 (NLSY97). "Hybrid" random effects models, which control for both observed and unobserved differences between youth, are used to examine the possibility that youth self-select into delinquency, drug use, and dropout. Results indicate that overall, drug use, but not delinquency, leads to dropping out, although the effects are small. When the effects of delinquency and drug use are examined separately for lower-class and middle-class youth, delinquency only leads to dropout for middle-class youth who are arrested. Drug use leads to dropout regardless of a youth's social class or whether they are suspended or arrested. These findings suggest that while the relationships among delinquency, drug use, and dropout are complicated, problem behaviors are not the primary reason why youth leave school. Implications for future research and dropout prevention are discussed. |
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Bibliography Citation
Gasper, Joseph Michael. Do Delinquency and Drug Use Lead to Dropping Out of High School? Ph.D. Dissertation, The Johns Hopkins University, 2009. |