Search Results

Title: Home Alone: The Impact of Maternal Employment on Delinquency
Resulting in 1 citation.
1. Vander Ven, Thomas Michael
Home Alone: The Impact of Maternal Employment on Delinquency
Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Cincinnati, 1998
Cohort(s): Children of the NLSY79, NLSY79
Publisher: UMI - University Microfilms, Bell and Howell Information and Learning
Keyword(s): Behavior; Behavior Problems Index (BPI); Child Self-Administered Supplement (CSAS); Children, Temperament; Delinquency/Gang Activity; Family Studies; Home Observation for Measurement of Environment (HOME); Maternal Employment

For several decades, social scientists have debated the social impact of the unprecedented number of mothers recently entering the paid workforce. While the majority of studies have found that the children of working mothers are generally no worse off than other children, many Americans continue to be concerned that maternal employment may contribute to behavior problems and delinquency. Although several researchers have investigated the relationship between maternal employment and delinquency, past efforts are limited by narrow conceptualizations of maternal employment and by a preoccupation with maternal supervision and control as the mediating variables between maternal employment and delinquency. With this dissertation, I investigate the maternal employment-delinquency relationship by examining many characteristics of maternal work, such as hours employed and workplace controls, and by considering a wide variety of mediating pathway variables. The impact of both early employment (i.e., maternal work during the child's pre-school years) and current employment (i.e., maternal work during adolescence) is studied through the use of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth data. Data on 876 mother and child pairs were used to investigate the connection between maternal employment, family life, and delinquency. Multiple regression techniques were employed to test hypotheses regarding the direct and indirect effects of maternal employment. The general finding of this study is that the characteristics of maternal work have relatively little or no effect on delinquency either directly or indirectly through the family-oriented pathway variables. The results of the analysis showed consistently that regardless of how this issue was examined, having a working mother has only small effects and that those effects are not consistently criminogenic.
Bibliography Citation
Vander Ven, Thomas Michael. Home Alone: The Impact of Maternal Employment on Delinquency. Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Cincinnati, 1998.