Tag Archives: research design

Work vs. Education: Are children of single-parent homes less likely to attend a place of higher education because they are more driven to the labor force immediately?

Question: Studies have shown that children from single-parent households are less likely to achieve a college degree than children from two-parent households. Is this correlation, though, due to a lack of inspiration or encouragement by the single-family home to attend college or is it rather a greater sense of work ethic and necessity to earn money immediately present in the children from single-family homes. For example, if the single-family home child noticed that money was tighter than it was in the two-parent household, that child might feel it is necessary to work full time in order to contribute or establish themselves as sort of a breadwinner, whereas the more economically stable family child may not and instead pursue higher education.

Variables: The household status of the individuals participating in the study when they were growing up. This will not be manipulated – only observed.

Type of Study: This study is meant to be correlational in design. It is impossible to isolate every variable that may contribute to a person’s overall work ethic and decision making process as they grow into adulthood, thus a cause and effect relationship cannot be established.

Measures: Surveys would be given to participants to indicate their family backgrounds – whether their households were single or two-parent – and their level of education and/or work experience. Participants will also be asked as to their reasoning for why they decided to either go to college, work, or do nothing (should that be the case). Independent case studies on individual participants would be ideal to help solidify some of the expectations, but it will be very difficult to do case studies on as many people as can be recorded by surveys.

Hypothesis: Children from single-parent homes are less likely to attend higher education because they are instead driven towards the wage-earning workforce.

Benefits and Implications: Should the hypothesis prove correct, it will hep to change the scornful public opinion which often looks poorly on individuals from one-parent households that go to work instead of going to college. This study would show that such decisions made by said individuals was in fact not a show of irresponsibility or lack of judgment but instead a rational and hard-working approach to secure an immediate future financially.

Challenges: It was hard to think of how to phrase the benefits. I am interested in this study because I know people who have forgone college in order to work because they felt it was simply a better idea to have a steady income, which makes logical sense, and I feel that reasoning is one that the public does not always appreciate. However, it’s difficult to think how proving that reasoning and the logic behind it would benefit society overall, since it does not appear to yield very tangible results. Instead it only offers a clearer image of the way things are without changing anything. I suppose that could be effective in its own right, but it seems like a tame outcome for an extensive study that (including individual case studies) could span years.