Does a Part-Time Job Act as a Social Bond to Prevent Juvenile Delinquency?

Abstract

This paper seeks to determine whether part-time jobs held by high school students can serve to prevent juvenile delinquency in the form of "involvement," one of the social bonds observed by Hirschi. Two statistical analyses using empirical data were conducted. The first statistical analysis compared 1,509 general high school students with 439 high school students who had police records. The author did a cross-tabulation and logistic regression analysis. The students' hope of progressing to a higher grade, club activities, and a part-time job were all used as independent variables. The second statistical analysis used self-reporting of juvenile delinquency in the general high school student population as a dependent variable in a similar analysis to the first one. Both statistical analyses (the one for students with a police record, and for those self-reporting delinquency) led to similar conclusions. A part-time job held by a high school student was not a factor preventing delinquency. On the contrary, high school students who work part-time, even when controlling for the hope of progressing to a higher grade and club activities, have a high probability of engaging in delinquent behavior. The author considered three logical possibilities to explain the results. The first possibility is that a part-time job is a risk factor of delinquency. The second possibility is that some characteristic of the juvenile delinquent leads him or her to take a part-time job. The third possibility is that the characteristics of parents who allow juveniles to work part-time can be interpreted to be the source of both.