Staff Jeremy, Osgood D Wayne, Schulenberg John E, Bachman Jerald G, Messersmith Emily E
The Pennsylvania State University.
Criminology. 2010 Nov 28;48(4):1101-1131. doi: 10.1111/j.1745-9125.2010.00213.x.
Most criminological theories predict an inverse relationship between employment and crime, but teenagers' involvement in paid work during the school year is positively correlated with delinquency and substance use. Whether the work-delinquency association is causal or spurious has long been debated. This study estimates the effect of paid work on juvenile delinquency using longitudinal data from the national Monitoring the Future project. We address issues of spuriousness by using a two-level hierarchical model to estimate the relationships of within-individual changes in juvenile delinquency and substance use to those in paid work and other explanatory variables. We also disentangle effects of actual employment from preferences for employment to provide insight about the likely role of time-varying selection factors tied to employment, delinquency, school engagement, and leisure activities. Whereas causal effects of employment would produce differences based on whether and how many hours respondents worked, we found significantly higher rates of crime and substance use among non-employed youth who preferred intensive versus moderate work. Our findings suggest the relationship between high-intensity work and delinquency results from preexisting factors that lead youth to desire varying levels of employment.
大多数犯罪学理论预测就业与犯罪之间存在负相关关系，但青少年在学年期间参与有偿工作与犯罪及药物使用呈正相关。工作与犯罪之间的关联是因果关系还是虚假关系，长期以来一直存在争议。本研究使用来自全国“监测未来”项目的纵向数据估计有偿工作对青少年犯罪的影响。我们通过使用两级分层模型来估计青少年犯罪和药物使用的个体内部变化与有偿工作及其他解释变量变化之间的关系，从而解决虚假性问题。我们还区分了实际就业的影响和就业偏好的影响，以深入了解与就业、犯罪、学校参与和休闲活动相关的随时间变化的选择因素可能发挥的作用。就业的因果效应会根据受访者是否工作以及工作时长产生差异，然而，我们发现，相较于中等强度工作，那些偏好高强度工作的未就业青年的犯罪率和药物使用率显著更高。我们的研究结果表明，高强度工作与犯罪之间的关系源于先前存在的因素，这些因素导致青少年渴望不同程度的就业。
