Characteristics of High School Students' Paid Jobs, and Employment Experience After Graduation

This chapter describes the prevalence of certain qualitative characteristics of teenage jobs, measured by a survey of young workers in 1979. Qualitative aspects of paid jobs held by teenagers received very little systematic attention in the past. Recently, however, a series of pioneering studies by Greenberger, Steinberg, and associates have led them to conclude that the poor quality of many contemporary teenage jobs threatens to make the young workers “economically rich, but … psychologically poor” (Greenberger & Steinberg, 1986, p. 238). Using longitudinal data on teenagers initially interviewed in 1979, we examine the consequences of qualitative differences in their 1979 jobs.