Browsing by Author "Catherine Zimmer, Committee Chair"

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    The Individual, Institutional, and Interactional Influences on Women's Decisions to Have a Child: A Multi-Level Examination.
    (2002-04-24) Rhea, Anisa Clair; Catherine Zimmer, Committee Chair
    Using data from Waves 1 and 2 of the National Survey of Families and Households (NSFH), I independently and aggregately examine multi-level predictors (individual, institutional, and interactional) of married women's decisions to have a child. The individual level consists of normative childbearing considerations for women and women's fertility intentions as antecedents of fertility decisions. I control for individual characteristics such as age, education, religion and race and their connections to the decision to have a child within all three levels. Within the institutional level I explore how women's employment and the costs and benefits of children influence the decision to have a child. At the interactional level I address the interaction of husbands' and wives' decisions to have a child within three interactional contexts: union stability, spousal disagreement, and gender attitudes. Based on my sample of 402 childless, fecund, married couples I analyze how the various indicators at Wave 1 predict the decision to have a child at Wave 2 using dichotomous logistic regression. Overall, at the various levels of analyses, I find that wives' intentions to have a child as well as their part-time employment, non-employment, and earnings are important factors in making the decision to have a child. Although the interactional contexts in which wives make the decision to have a child do not appear to significantly influence their decisions, the interaction variables of wives' and husbands' earnings and childbearing benefits are important. Additionally the wife's age and the couple's Catholic religious preference significantly influence women's decisions to have a child. The results of my analyses suggest that various factors are important predictors of women's decisions to have a child; however, future research, using larger and racially diverse samples of childless married couples and more refined measures of the decision to have a child, is needed to enrich our understanding of such an important issue.
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    The Other Side of the Track: Curriculum Tracking and the Pathway to Delinquency
    (2003-04-30) Febbo-Hunt, Maria; Catherine Zimmer, Committee Chair; L. Richard Della Fave, Committee Member; Rodney L. Engen, Committee Member; William R. Smith, Committee Member
    This dissertation examines whether school track location contributes to involvement in juvenile delinquency. First, I hypothesized both a direct and an indirect effect of track location on involvement in juvenile delinquency. Second, I hypothesized grade point average (GPA) would be negatively related to involvement in delinquency. Lastly, I hypothesized peer exposure would affect involvement in delinquency. Specifically, youth located in a non-academic track, with lower grades, and higher levels of negative peer exposure will be more likely to engage in delinquency. Using the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 and employing Poisson and Negative Binomial regression techniques, I found the following. There are no significant direct effects of tracking on delinquency for the multivariate models. Further analyses show there are indirect, negative effects, via GPA, of being in the general/college-prep and the combination track versus the vocational track on rates of committing additional types of property offending. Youth in the general/college-prep track earn higher grades relative to students in the vocational track, who, in turn, have lower rates of engaging in additional property offenses. For the remaining three delinquency models, there appear to be no indirect effects of tracking via grade point average. For status, violent and overall offending, exposure to negative peers results in higher rates of committing additional types of offending. For property offending, there is only an indirect effect of negative peers on offending. What does this study have to say about schooling and delinquency? First, academic achievement matters with respect to involvement in delinquency. Second, there is evidence that track location has an indirect effect on the commission of additional types of property offenses. Combined other research findings illustrating other undesirable outcomes of tracking, we must ask, "Is this structuring of students worth the cost relative to the pedagogical benefits?" Further research is warranted to fully answer this question, thus I advocate bringing tracking 'back in' to comprehensive studies of juvenile delinquency.