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

Gainful Activity

Description

Specific Information: Gainful Activity

Gainful activity is a construct that consolidates school attendance and employment information into a single monthly variable that is intended to indicate positive community adjustment. This variable was developed to capture positive adjustment since, in a sample of adolescents, neither school nor work information alone would sufficiently reflect this construct. For example, some adolescents have legally dropped out of school but are working full time and others are not working but are attending school -- both examples fulfill what many would consider a positive social role for an adolescent (see note below for an exception to this view).¹

The gainful activity construct is similar to that used by other researchers (see Bullis, Yovanoff & Havel, 2004) and was developed to provide descriptive data about school attendance and employment without drawing inferences about the impact of these simultaneous experiences on development. We do not have information about the quality of work situations and we do not have information regarding the specific number of days the youth missed school (e.g., the interview question from which the school criterion was drawn simply asks "Did you miss five or more days of school this month? Yes/No").

A "gainfully active" month is defined as attending school in the community and missing fewer than five days of school that month, OR working in the community for at least two weeks of the month, at 20 or more hours per week. This marker is generally only assigned to months which are defined as "community" months, that is, months during which the subject was in the community for eight or more days. However, credit was given to those months where the subject was regularly attending community school and/or working part-time in the community during months marked as institution months, although this was rare (see "Data Issues" for more information about this).

The school attendance determination is made using variables from the school calendar, specifically, those asking about school enrollment for each month, the number of days suspended/expelled and whether they missed five or more days of school that month for any reason (physical illness, afraid to go, truancy, etc.). The working part time determination is made using items from the work calendar, including whether they had a community based job that month, the number of weeks worked that month, and the number of hours worked per week.

There are two additional codebook sections that are relevant to gainful activity:

• The monthly calendar data describing school enrollment and attendance. This codebook section is called the "School Calendar".
• The monthly calendar data describing employment history. This codebook section is called the "Making and Spending Money Calendar".

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 school attendance and employment.

Items available from the gainful activity calendar include:

• For each month of the recall period: whether the subject regularly attended a community school, whether the subject worked at least part-time in the community, and whether the subject was gainfully active in the community that month (combining school attendance and employment).
• At the recall level: the proportion of the recall period the subject was gainfully active in the community.
• Cumulative for each yearly interval: the proportion of months gainfully active.

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 contact education and employment 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).
• Conflicting information between the Out of Community Placements Calendar (which is used to create the community month marker) and the school and work calendars means that gainful activity cannot be computed for some months. This happens when the month is counted as a community month (because the out of community placement calendar shows the subject spent less than eight days in secure facilities that month) but the school and/or work calendars reflect an institution school and/or institution job.
• The subject receives credit for regularly attending school and/or working part-time in the community both during a community month and during an institution month. The latter generally happens when the month is counted as an institution month but the subject spent the majority of the month in the community (only 8 or 9 days in an institution).
• The recall period item "proportion of community months gainfully active" is only computed if more than half of the community months in the recall period have valid (non-missing) data.
• The recall period item "proportion of community months gainfully active" cannot be reproduced by summing the number of community months and the number of months gainfully active, for several reasons:
• The restrictions placed on the amount of data required to be present to receive a proportion score.
• Gainful activity is not limited to community months. Some community months are excluded from the denominator due to conflicting information with the school and work calendars, while some institution months are included in the denominator because the subject spent the majority of the month in the community and either worked part-time or attended school regularly.

Items available

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

• ¹Employment during adolescence can have both deleterious and salutary influences on development. Researchers have found that high work intensity (more than 20 hours per week) while youth are attending school can have negative effects on behavioral and emotional outcomes but that this effect may be specific to poor-quality work experiences (Mortimer & Staff, 2004).
• 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.
• Bullis, M., Yovanoff, P., & Havel, E. (2004). The importance of getting started right: Further examination of the facility to-community transition of formerly incarcerated youth. The Journal of Special Education, 38, 80-94.
• Mortimer, J. T., & Staff, J. (2004). Early work as a source of developmental discontinuity during the transition to adulthood. Development and Psychopathology, 16, 1047-1070.

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