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Job Corps is the United State’s largest and most comprehensive training program for disadvantaged youth aged 16–24 years old. A randomized social experiment concluded that, on average, individuals benefited from the program in the form of higher weekly earnings and employment prospects. At the same time, “young adults” (ages 20–24) realized much higher impacts relative to “adolescents” (ages 16–19). Employing recent nonparametric bounds for causal mediation, we investigate whether these two groups’ disparate effects correspond to them benefiting differentially from distinct aspects of Job Corps, with a particular focus on the attainment of a degree (GED, high school, or vocational). We find that, for young adults, the part of the total effect of Job Corps on earnings (employment) that is due to attaining a degree within the program is at most 41% (32%) of the total effect, whereas for adolescents that part can account for up to 87% (100%) of the total effect. We also find evidence that the magnitude of the part of the effect of Job Corps on the outcomes that works through components of Job Corps other than degree attainment (e.g., social skills, job placement, residential services) is likely higher for young adults than for adolescents. That those other components likely play a more important role for young adults has policy implications for more effectively servicing participants. More generally, our results illustrate how researchers can learn about particular mechanisms of an intervention.

Purpose – The connections between religious factors and stratification outcomes were long ignored in the sociological literature, yet a growing number of studies show that religion remains important for determining the life chances of individuals. I add to this literature by examining how religious affiliation is associated with the structure of occupational attainment in the United States.

Methodology – I analyze data from the 1972–2008 General Social Surveys to show how religious affiliation is related to occupational attainment and occupational mobility by gender and race.

Findings – I find that sectarian Protestants occupy the lower rungs of the occupational structure, even relative to their low rates of educational attainment. In contrast, Jews and nonidentifying respondents show considerable occupational advantage. Catholics also have specific patterns of occupational attainment that hint at their growing wealth parity with mainline Protestants. I also show that religious influences hold across racial and gender groupings, and across cohorts.

Social implications – Religion continues to significantly influence the occupational structure in the United States, and sectarian religion serves as an important anchor hindering occupational attainment.

This chapter examines the relationship between community educational attainment and Fourth Amendment legal principles being implemented in public schools. Using education attainment data obtained from the U.S. Census, this study examined the influence of educational attainment on how searches of students were conducted and the relative legal and judicial outcomes. The results of this study offer insight on issues related to forms of discipline in public schools and contribute to knowledge bases in the fields of economics, law, social theory, and educational leadership and administration.

Prior studies regarding the Fourth Amendment in schools focused largely on administrative decisions, judgments, and practices, but the aspect of educational attainment has been minimally investigated. Findings suggest community educational attainment has little to no predictive influence on aspects related to student searches examined in the study, which include the intrusiveness level of the search and the number of searches occurring during a single search event. Implications for future research and leadership are discussed.

The purpose of this paper was to examine the robustness of the findings on educational advantage among sexual minority men.

Using nationally representative data (AddHealth) and controlling for other predictors of academic attainment, we examine the educational attainment of sexual minority males by using hierarchical regression and logistical regression for two measures of sexual identity.

We find robust differences in educational attainment across analyses and sexual orientation constructs. Our results show sexual minority identity predicts up to a year more of education for male respondents and consistently reporting male homosexuals have an even greater advantage, more than one and a half years, compared to inconsistent responders.

Our results extend previous research on educational outcomes for nonheterosexual adolescents, suggesting there are sustained differences in long-term educational outcomes for nonheterosexual adults and supporting earlier analyses of the AddHealth survey data. This study contributes to the existing literature by examining educational attainment as measured by continuous years and cut-points, using two measures of sexual orientation, providing estimates for all Wave 4 sexual minority identities (i.e., not collapsing any sexual minority category), and controlling for adolescent school geography and type. Moreover, we find early identification of sexual orientation and stability of sexual orientation may be an important source of variation in identifying LGBTQ adolescents who are at greater academic risk or who may benefit from increased social support.

A country’s performance in health attainment refers to both its achievement (level) and its improvement (evolution) in the health domain. Studies on performance generally measure health attainment using the average health level of the population and quantify health improvement employing the change in attainment over time. However, this approach is flawed because the change in attainment does not satisfy good properties, on the one hand, and because health attainment should not only account for the average health level but also for disparities in health in the population, on the other hand. We propose a solution to the first limitation by following the lead of Kakwani (1993), who uses achievement and improvement measures which are based on attainment measures and which satisfy important properties. For the second limitation, we extend the work of Kakwani and propose new definitions of attainment that account for the average health level but also for health inequalities in the population. Specifically, we focus on overall and social health inequalities and on the health of the poor. By including these new attainment variables into Kakwani’s indices, we generate new classes of achievement and improvement indices. Using data on 11 low- and middle-income Asian countries in the twenty-first century, we highlight that child and maternal health have generally improved in recent decades, due to both an increase in the average health level and a decrease in inequalities.

When health is measured by a bounded variable, differences in health can be presented as levels of attainment or shortfall. Measurement of heath inequality then usually involves the choice of either the attainment or the shortfall distribution, and this choice may affect comparisons of inequality across populations. A number of indices have been introduced to overcome this problem. This chapter proposes a framework in which attainment and shortfall distributions can be jointly analyzed. Joint distributions of attainments and shortfalls are defined from points of view consistent with concerns for relative, absolute or intermediate inequality. Inequality measures invariant according to the corresponding ethical criterion are then applied. A dominance criterion that guarantees unanimous rankings of the joint distributions is also proposed.

This study examines the extent to which educational outcomes are transmitted from mothers to daughters in rural China. An analysis of the 2010 China Family Panel Survey reveals that: (i) how far daughters go in their education is strongly associated with their mothers’ education; (ii) the association between mothers’ and daughters’ educational outcomes in rural China was found to be stronger than the corresponding relationships between mothers and sons, fathers and daughters, and fathers and sons, especially at higher levels of education; and (iii) while having more brothers and being born later worsens daughters’ educational outcomes, mothers’ higher education effectively mitigates these negative effects. These findings add to a growing body of literature and empirical evidence that challenges conventional social mobility research paradigms that neglect mothers’ roles. More importantly, the distinction between mother–daughter relationship and that between fathers and daughters and mothers and sons highlights the fact that education is likely transmitted intergenerationally via mechanisms that differ depending on the gendered parent–child pairs.

What change in the distribution of a population’s health preserves the level of inequality? The answer to this analogous question in the context of income inequality lies somewhere between a uniform and a proportional change. These polar positions represent the absolute and relative inequality equivalence criterion (IEC), respectively. A bounded health variable may be presented in terms of both health attainments and shortfalls. As a distributional change cannot simultaneously be proportional to attainments and to shortfalls, relative inequality measures may rank populations differently from the two perspectives. In contrast to the literature that stresses the importance of measuring inequality in attainments and shortfalls consistently using an absolute IEC, this chapter formalizes a new compromise concept for a bounded variable by explicitly considering the two relative IECs, defined with respect to attainments and shortfalls, to represent the polar cases of defensible positions.

We use a surplus-sharing approach to provide new insights on commonly used inequality indices by evaluating the underpinning IECs in terms of how infinitesimal surpluses of health must be successively distributed to preserve the level of inequality. We derive a one-parameter IEC that, unlike those implicit in commonly used indices, assigns constant weights to the polar cases independent of the health distribution.

New developments in concepts and approaches to job stress should incorporate all relevant types of resources that promote well-being and health. The success resource model of job stress conceptualizes subjective success as causal agents for employee well-being and health (Grebner, Elfering, & Semmer, 2008a). So far, very little is known about what kinds of work experiences are perceived as success. The success resource model defines four dimensions of subjective occupational success: goal attainment, pro-social success, positive feedback, and career success. The model assumes that subjective success is a resource because it is valued in its own right, triggers positive affect and emotions (e.g., pleasure, cf., Weiss & Cropanzano, 1996), helps to protect and gain other resources like self-efficacy (Hobfoll, 1998, 2001), has direct positive effects on well-being (e.g., job satisfaction, cf., Locke & Latham, 1990) and health (Carver & Scheier, 1999), facilitates learning (Frese & Zapf, 1994), and has an energizing (Locke & Latham, 1990, 2002) and attention-directing effect (Carver, 2003), which can promote recovery by promoting mental detachment from work tasks in terms of absence of job-related rumination in leisure time (Sonnentag & Bayer, 2005).

The model proposes that success is promoted by other resources like job control (Frese & Zapf, 1994) while job stressors, like hindrance stressors such as performance constraints and role ambiguity (LePine, Podsakoff, & LePine, 2005), can work against success (Frese & Zapf, 1994). The model assumes reciprocal direct effects of subjective success on well-being, health, and recovery (upward spiral), and a moderator effect of success on the stressor–strain relationship. The chapter discusses research evidence, measurement of subjective occupational success, value of the model for job stress interventions, future research requirements, and methodological concerns.

Purpose – This chapter proposes a new model to explain how increased religiosity among children leads to higher eventual educational attainment; it does so by focusing upon the unique role that parental religiosity plays in this process – this intergenerational dimension has been neglected in previous research on the topic.

Design/Methodology/Approach – Using NLSY97 data, employing regression techniques, and incorporating information on parental religious behaviors, this chapter tests whether parental religiosity only matters because it transmits religiosity to children, and once children become religious themselves, parental religiosity becomes a redundant resource – or it has a powerful independent effect net of this socialization process.

Finding – Results generally support the parental religiosity theory, where parental religious service attendance uniquely produces positive educational effects, even net of religious socialization ones. Religious affiliation differences are generally minor. Additional models also provide evidence that parental religiosity and adolescent education are not related via some omitted variable.

Research limitations/Implications – Under this new perspective, children's educational attainment can rise, even if children are not religious themselves, because parental religiosity can promote parental behaviors conducive to children's schooling.

Originality/Value – Overall, parental religiosity deserves renewed attention as a cultural basis for inequality in the United States today.