A study of serious adolescent offenders as they transition to adulthood and out of crime

Education: Academic Achievement and Post-High School Program Participation

Description

Specific Information: Academic Achievement and Post-High School Program Participation

We have attempted to capture the level of academic achievement reached by each subject. This includes markers for whether various degrees (e.g. GED, HS diploma and post high-school degrees) were obtained as well as the dates of completion.

There are four codebook sections that are relevant to school information:

• Markers for academic achievement and participation in post-high school programs (described here).
• The monthly calendar data. This codebook section is called the 'School Calendar'.
• Summary measures regarding the education experience (high school and post-high school), including school attachment, descriptive information about the school experience (grades, involvement in school activities), and questions regarding college experiences (attendance, major, financing, attitudes and experiences at college). This codebook section is called "Education (Follow-ups): School Boding Grades Activities and Orientation" and can be found under Measures.
• Gainful Activity. This construct consolidates school attendance and employment information into a single monthly variable that is intended to indicate positive community adjustment. This can be found under the "Gainful Activity" section of the Calendar codebook.

Be sure to review the descriptions for each of these codebook sections in order to obtain a complete understanding of the information we have available regarding the education experience.

Items available in this section include:

• Cumulative through 84months: whether the participant ever attended GED classes, high school, college/university, and classes towards a license/certificate; whether the participant ever completed each of the four types of school; the recall period month (s#m#) of completion; the type of degree received if they completed college; whether the college degree, GED, and license/certificate was obtained online; if high school was never completed, the last grade completed.
• At the recall level: the completion status of each of the four types of schooling as of that recall period (e.g., completed this recall period, completed in an earlier recall period, completed later).

Descriptive Information: Monthly Data Characterizing the Recall Period

As a standard practice, the specific calendar information will be accompanied by four variables which describe the recall period. This information is important for the user to consider when attempting to use data characterizing the recall period (e.g., measures) in conjunction with the monthly-level calendar data. In addition, this information is useful if the user is viewing events from a developmental perspective. These variables include:

• The actual number of days in each month that is represented in the calendar data.
• The calendar month and year mapped to the recall month (e.g., if S1M04 covers February 2003, the 'number of days' value for that month will be 28, and the calendar month associated with S1M04 will be 02/2003, "RealDate").
• The subject's age at each month of the recall period, available in two forms: 1) the subject's age truncated to a whole number, and 2) the age as a continuous variable. (The subject age at the time of the interview is available in the "Demographics" codebook, available under "Measures").
• A marker indicating whether each month of the recall period is a community or institution month, where an institution month is defined as a month where the subject spent eight or more days across the following type of out of community placements: drug/alcohol facility, psychiatric hospital or unit, jail or prison, detention, YDC or ADJC, contracted residential treatment (general), and contracted residential treatment (mental health). These setting types are described in detail in the "Out of Community Placements" codebook, available under "Calendars".

In addition, each dataset includes five variables which describe basic information related to the interview. These are explained in full detail in the "Interview Information" section under "Measures". These variables include the completion status of the interview, the date of the interview, version number in which the interview was conducted, the number of months in the recall period, and the number of days in the recall period.

General Information: Use of monthly life calendar data

Data regarding the participant's self-reported education is captured using a monthly life-calendar approach (Belli, 1998; Caspi, Moffitt, Thornton, & Freedman, 1996), where the research participant is provided with a visual calendar that contextualizes the recall of research data by anchoring information to salient events. Specifically, individuals are first asked to recount salient events which occurred in the recall period (e.g. birthdays, deaths) and this information remains visible to the participant as an anchor point for the timing of events in each of several life calendar domains. This approach thus creates an integrated view of activities in all of the domains examined, has firm roots in the science of how people remember events and life situations (Bradburn, Rips, and Shevell, 1987; Belli, 1998), and capitalizes on these processes to generate accounts of past events. On a practical level, it provides researchers with a richer set of data points. Instead of simply getting a summary measure of life changes over an extended recall period, the monthly life-calendar places these changes at specific points in time, opening up the possibility of examining sequences of events and potential causal mechanisms within individuals (Fals-Stewart, 2003; Mulvey, et al., 2006).

General Information: Conversion of data to linear months

The monthly Pathways data, in its raw form, is not suited for some kinds of analytic approaches (e.g., trajectory analysis). Each time point interview allows for a maximum of eight or 14 months in the recall period, depending on the follow-up wave (eight months was the maximum for time points 6-36 and 14 was the maximum for time points 48-84). This means that there is a corresponding variable in the dataset reflecting events occurring in each of those months through a maximum of 14 months (the outer limit of any of the possible months covered). If however, the recall period did not include the maximum number of months (as is most often the case), there will be variables with no data. For example, subject 1 has a recall period of five months for follow-up 12 so this means he/she will have data in five monthly variables but not in the remaining nine. Subject 2, has seven months in the recall period for follow-up 12 so he/she will have data in all but seven of the monthly variables. The recall length is set by programming code based on the current date in relationship to the date of the previous interview (see "Interview Information" under Measures for a more detailed description of how the length of the recall period is determined). However, the programming code did permit the interviewer to "reset" by hand the length of the recall period. This was done infrequently, but in some instances it created a situation where we obtained two reports of the same month. For example, follow-up 6 covered months January to June and the interviewer resets the follow-up 12 recall period to start with June (leading to two different reports for the month of June). A series of data cleaning decisions (described in the "Making and Spending Money Calendar Documentation") were implemented to correct these situations but we note them here because they are relevant to the conversion of the data to linear months.

The "linear months" data set-up corrects these two situations. The "linear months" data reformats the variables so that each variable is a sequential representation of life event data for each month of the research participant's life from the baseline interview forward. In this format, variables that were place-markers for months not covered in the recall period are eliminated and situations where there were two reports for the same month are corrected. Thus, "linear month 8" actually represents eight calendar months from the baseline and "linear month 16" is actually 16 months past the baseline interview.

A specific list of variables available in the linear format is provided below. Also provided is a "map" to link the linear month back to the recall period and month in which the information was originally collected. This is important to know when recall-level data is being used in conjunction with the monthly event calendar data.

Data Issues

• The follow06 through follow36 timepoints allow for a maximum of eight months in the recall period, while follow48 and later will have a maximum of 14. Note that while variables for months 9 through 14 are included in the datasets for follow06 through follow36, these are essentially place markers and in no instance will any case have data for these months until the follow48 period (see description above).
• A series of questions asked up through interview version 01.21 obtained information on the completion status of different levels of education: GED, high school diploma, college degrees, and other licenses and certificates. Due to inconsistent reports across time, and because programming bugs caused these questions to sometimes be skipped, we were unable to obtain a complete and accurate summary of the participant's education history.

In version 01.22, those questions were dropped from the interview and replaced with a new series of questions meant to obtain a complete education history for each participant. These items captured information on the attendance and completion of each level of education, as well as dates of completion.

We were able to collect this information for the majority of the study sample, however 149 cases will be missing all academic achievement information for any number of reasons (the subject dropped out of the study prior to the addition of these new items; the subject is deceased; all later interviews were missed, etc).

Items available regarding academic achievement

For an overview and a detailed list of the questions included with this calendar please select the link(s). In addition to providing an overview of the "flow" of the calendar and a detailed listing of the questions, this document notes version issues (i.e. questions/variables that are only present for a sub-sample due to their later addition to the interview) and provides other information that is critical to using and interpreting the data correctly. The table below gives you an overview of issues related to each construct noted above and it also provides you with the page numbers within our detailed document that address each of these constructs. Please be sure to consider this information carefully before moving forward with your analysis.

Click here to download a detailed document in PDF format.

References

• Caspi, A., Moffitt, T., Thornton, A., Friedman, D., Amell, J., Harrington, H., et al. (1996). The Life History Calendar: A research and clinical assessment method for collecting retrospective event-history data. International Journal of Methods in Psychiatric Research, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., US, 6(2), 101-114.
• Belli, R.F. (1998). The structure of autobiographical memory and the event history calendar: Potential improvements in the quality of retrospective reports in surveys. Memory, 6(4), 383-406.
• Burns, Barbara J., Adrian Angold, Kathryn Magruder-Habib, Elizabeth J. Costello, and M. K. Patrick. 1992. The Child and Adolescent Services Assessment (CASA). Durham, NC: Duke University Medical Center.
• Other types of schools/programs and licenses/degrees/certificates, and College Experience: Furstenberg, F.F. (2000) Selected items from ongoing research from the MacArthur Network on Transition to Adulthood.
• Other items regarding educational experiences developed by the working group.

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