| It is generally believed that the most important benefit of work for young people is that it assists them in their psychosocial development. Many say it does so by building character, teaching responsibility and aiding in the transition to adulthood. There is mounting evidence, however, that the extents to which youth gain these and other benefits is constrained by the quality of the jobs they perform. Recent research has moved beyond looking at the effects of work status or work intensity on adolescent psychosocial development and have focused on how job quality can play a role. Their research has linked certain job characteristics with certain psychosocial outcomes. For example, one study found that teens who work in jobs that offer opportunities to use skills and talents reported greater life satisfaction. These investigations, however, have not examined how such job characteristics are distributed among the jobs in which adolescents work. The extent to which teen jobs offer the young people working in them the opportunity to use their skills and talents, for example, remains unknown. As work is an integral part of the lives of a majority of young people in the U.S., it is important to understand the conditions that characterize the jobs in which developing adolescents spend their work time thus this study examines the extent to which those characteristics associated with positive, and negative, adolescent psychosocial development are found within the contemporary work experiences of today's teens. |
