Life Course Patterns of Urban Youth Through the Third Decade

Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore MD

Investigators

Abstract

This project has three aims: 1) to track and interview at age 28 the Beginning School Study's (BSS) long-term panel of urban youth; 2) to sketch a detailed portrait of the group's mature adult standing in three key life domains (education since high school, workplace experience, and mental health status); 3) to use the enhanced BSS longitudinal data to pose questions about life outcomes in adulthood in relation to formative experiences over middle childhood and adolescence. Baltimore based, the BSS has been monitoring the educational progress and personal development of a representative, random sample approximately 800 local public school children, starting when they began first grade in fall 1982. Typical urban youth are not often the focus of long-term developmental studies, but African Americans make up the majority of the BSS panel (55%) and 75 percent of the panel was living in low-income households when the project commenced. Coverage of the panel's experience at present extends though the years immediately after high school, to ages 22-23. These data have supported research on high school completion, college entry, and early work experience, but we know that the transition to adulthood has stretched out in the modern era, and typically much remains unsettled in the early 20.s. The Mature Adult Survey at ages 27-28 will afford a more definitive accounting of the group's adult life circumstances and trajectories, supporting studies of postsecondary program completion (including vocational training), career success, criminal persistence and desistance, family relationships, and health status toward the end of the third decade of life. Data will be archived and deposited with the social science data library at Harvard's Murray Research Center, making this valuable data resource available to the wider scientific community. The main scientific objective is to identify sources of resilience in the lives of disadvantaged urban youth that enable many of them to overcome poverty and other handicapping conditions to finish school or training programs, find their way to steady work with good prospects, enter into satisfying and stable relationships, avoid debilitating substance abuse, stay out of trouble with the law, and attain a sense of personal satisfaction as their lives have unfolded. The project has significant broader impacts in that it involves underrepresented minority and low-income youth as study participants, has an interdisciplinary leadership team, will make project data available for use by the broader scientific community, and could potentially provide insights for improving the life prospects of disadvantaged youth. Previous BSS research on summer learning, grade retention, and educational tracking, were widely disseminated to the social science research community as well as through popular media, and helped to inform several areas of education policy. Similar impacts are expected from the results of this study